Search results

Narrative-biographical perspectives have taken on a very prominent role in both the research on and practices of teacher education (both preservice and in-service) over the past decades. This chapter briefly situates and explains this “narrative turn,” and continues with the presentation and discussion of concrete pedagogical applications of narrative-biographical approaches. A storied example of one approach is followed by a general discussion of its educational rationale and the necessary conditions for its use. References are made to narrative language as a genre, its contextualized nature as well as the connection with (student) teachers’ developing sense of self.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of life story for the teaching of sociology to Social Work students. It contains the results of a teaching experiment in higher education which aims to foster sociological imagination among students.

The study employs a mixed methodology. The quantitative data came from a survey handed out to the students with closed and open questions. The qualitative information came from the contents of class exercises in which the students had to connect the theoretical contents of the course of sociology with the biographical narratives of different research subjects.

The results reflect student satisfaction or appreciation regarding the use of the life story as a teaching resource, as well as a successful acquisition of sociological skills and knowledge, such as critical thinking, micro-macro connection and the interplay between structure and agency.

Life story and narrative methods should be employed in post-secondary education as teaching instruments.

The study contributes to expand the reflection on narrative techniques as a pedagogical tool. The paper provides several examples of class exercises with biographical narratives that have demonstrated to be successful for teaching sociology in higher education.

Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

This study aims to describe and evaluate various visual and creative tools for supporting the in-depth biographical interview aimed at analyzing educational communities and their stakeholders.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper suggests reflecting on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

The main contribution of this paper is to unpack the uses and applications of four visual tools that support the interview technique. First, photo-elucidation is presented as a sensory strategy to stimulate the narrative during the dialogical exchange of the interview. Next, the timeline is described as a visual concretization of the traditional biogram widely used in educational research. Next, the authors unravel the uses of the organizational chart in educational research, which, due to its nature and utility, provides a glimpse of the organizational functioning of an institution and is particularly suitable for research in institutional frameworks. Finally, the tool known as the flight of the geese is presented. This tool is recommended for use in educational leadership and teamwork studies due to its simplicity and high representativeness of the hierarchy of roles and functions.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions, and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper invites us to reflect on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram, and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an emerging approach in research on school leadership, within the framework of the “International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP)”, where one of the three key research strands is “Principals’ identities”.

The paper responds, from a biographical-narrative approach, to knowledge about the impact of the Spanish model of school management on the professional identity of school principals. It analyses the biographical interviews of 15 school principals, through a process of structuring and categorizing the data collected, applying content analysis.

The dimensions of the principals’ identities emerge in different categories: personal identity, professional identity (internal perspective), professional identity (external perspective), social identity, professionalization and dual identity.

The authors studied identities in a project entitled “Successful school principals”, understanding that successful leadership practices largely depend on headteachers’ identities. That is, when the identities are weak and unstable, with a poor identification with the managerial tasks and functions, and not recognised by the teaching staff, the school will probably be unsuccessful. On the contrary, when there are headteachers with a strong professional identity, the authors want to show that there is a positive impact on improvement of results. In the future, in the development of the research project, the authors aim to verify the relationship between headteachers’ identities and educational improvement.

The knowledge gained in our study would enable us to reimagine lines in order to increase the professionalization and identities of headteachers, redesigning work contexts in ways which can strengthen fragile and unstable identities. Finally, the implications of the study in relation to future research can be summarised by the following ideas.

Understanding the world of the lives (lebenswelt) of Spanish headteachers means adopting a hermeneutic approach, observing the self-interpretation comments expressed by the subjects, where the temporal and biographical dimensions occupy a key role. The authors understand professional identity as a socially constructed and personally created experience with its own meanings, feelings and intentions. Therefore, it is logical to use, for data collection, individual interviews which explore the school context and the impact which it has on those subjects who are part of the professional environment. In addition, the authors have the intention of following up the study of identities.

It formulates, first, the theoretical framework for the professional identity from a narrative approach, linked – at the same time – to the practice of leadership, as an interactive relationship with the other members of the school. Successful leadership practices depend to a large degree on strong principals’ identities. Finally, the results are discussed, and future lines are proposed to articulate and strengthen the identity of school principals in Spain.

The person of the teacher is an essential element in what constitutes professional teaching and therefore needs careful conceptualisation. In this chapter the author argues for this central thesis, presenting a wrap up of his theoretical and empirical work on the issue over the past decade. These studies have been inspired – both conceptually and methodologically – by teacher thinking-research as well as the narrative-biographical approach to teaching and teacher development. The result is an empirically grounded conceptual framework on teacher development and teacher professionalism. Central concepts are ‘professional self-understanding’ and ‘subjective educational theory’ as components of the personal interpretative framework every individual teacher develops throughout his/her career. This personal framework results from the reflective and meaningful interactions between the individual teacher and the social, cultural and structural working conditions constituting his/her job context(s). As such the framework is the dynamic outcome of an ongoing process of professional learning (development). Furthermore, it is argued that the particular professionalism or scholarship of teachers is fundamentally characterised by personal commitment and vulnerability, which eventually have consequences for the kind of reflective attitudes and skills professional teachers should master.

This paper aims to further the understanding of women entrepreneurs' multiple identities by exploring how they interact throughout women's life cycles.

This article combines a case study and a narrative analysis to investigate the experience of a woman who founded a business and retired after passing it on to her son. Data were collected by combining two different methods: biographical interview and follow-up interviews or conversations.

Findings show that interactions between a woman entrepreneur's multiple identities may evolve through two main processes of change: transformation and fading. In the transformation process, adverse interactions between identities turn into synergistic and fruitful relationships. In the fading process, conflicts between identities gradually disappear, giving way to peaceful coexistence. Women's agency proves paramount in making these processes possible and helping her achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

In prior studies, women entrepreneurs have mostly been observed at a specific time or stage in their life and entrepreneurial experience. This paper responds to the call for the adoption of a dynamic perspective in the analysis of interactions among a woman entrepreneur's multiple identities so as to show how they may evolve during her entrepreneurial experience.

The article aims at analyzing narratives discourses to project dialogic storying as relevant in a mode of narrative research in English language education.

As an English language teacher and researcher, the author adopts narrative analysis as the research method for doctoral study, so this article delves into narrative research methods, especially in the context of English language education. The author found various existing notions on narrative research from Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and Barkhuizen et al. (2014), who contend that narrative is a mode of processing experiences and events in the form of a story. The author corroborated various notions on narrative research in English language education as an argument that narratives can be a strong data source in English language educational research. Since it has been a research focus for English language educators, the author explored seven dissertations that were submitted to a Nepalese university in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

The article aims at analyzing narratives discourses to project dialogic storying as relevant in a mode of narrative research in English language education. While examining the dissertations, the author found that the subjective and ideological exploration of narratives is in practice; however, they need further in-depth analysis under a specific framing. The author argues that the concept of dialogic storying can be strong narrative research in English language education.

It has examined prospective applications of the dialogic storying process using dissertations submitted to a University in Nepal. In terms of conceptual discussions on narratives and narrative analysis, it is more interpretive.

It provides an initial framing to get into narrative research in English language education. It allows academics to go further into subjective and ideological inquiries in order to discuss more categorical elements in narrative research.

It is a more thematic and interpretive discussion so it discusses existing and appropriate practices in narrative research methods to defend the dialogic storying approach. It has not counter argued the existing knowledge; however, it provides insights to clarify dialogic storying as a research approach.