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The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

In this chapter, I explicate the engagement of poetic expression as research analysis to understand more deeply and to represent more rigorously the experience of research participants within educational research. As a tool of analysis, poetry has the strength to disrupt expectations and invite multiple interpretations of research. Here, I articulate a methodology for engaging poetic expression fully as a tool of narrative research to reach beyond textual analysis and representation of participants’ conversations into a deeper expression of their stories to live by. Poetic expression of narrative research is the particular emphasized, which is to say that meaning-making facilitated by poetic expression relies on a consistent and minute focus on the particular. Through poetic expression of research, thoroughly member-checked by participants, I surface and make evident my position as a researcher within the research. This chapter identifies ways in which poetic expression of research invites voice on multiple levels. The poetic expression of research within a narrative inquiry makes visible the experience of the research as an unfolding experience itself for the participant, the researcher, and the reader. I demonstrate the ways in which infusing a narrative inquiry with the poetic expression of research provokes the researcher as well as the reader to draw deeply on personal experience to make sense of the research. Furthermore, poetic expression of research invites participation from readers to engage poetically with the research and become a subsequent co-participant/researcher as they make sense, themselves, of the poetic expressions of research.

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine the influence of the commonplace of sociality within narrative inquiry during the process of interpretation and meaning-making. Our project was multivisioned because we were interested in what we learned about the methodology of narrative inquiry within the context of a phenomenon for inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), which for this study was our identity as teacher educators (Bullough, 2005).

Approach – Using narrative inquiry, we interrogate our interpretive processes privileging the commonplace of sociality in examining stories of our identity as teacher educators from our own experience as teacher educators.

Findings – In our inquiry into interpretation from the orientation of the narrative commonplace of the social, four points of understanding emerged: (1) interpretation within the methodology of narrative inquiry is living and interpretation exists in the midst; (2) all three dimensions of the narrative inquiry space are always part of the process regardless of the commonplace under consideration; (3) if we look inward/outward in the process of interpretation, it always leads us back to the relational; and (4) when we deepen the analytic process, ethical issues, and therefore renewed grappling with our identity, emerge.

Research implications – Narrative inquiry at every phase – design, data collection, analysis, and representation – is a form of living and analysis and interpretation. As well, representation must allow space for the holistic and organic quality that this form of inquiry demands in the development and communication of ideas.

Value – The study points to the ways in which research on humans’ action and interaction returns to the relational and ethical even when that is not the focus of the research. Further, our response to narrative inquiry is not always analysis but often turns to story instead.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the articulation of the affordances of two qualitative methodologies when used within one study to address the multi-dimensional nature of the research phenomena.

This paper considers one example of combining narrative inquiry and phenomenological inquiry to construct new understandings of teacher learning from an Australian study.

The author draws on the individual meaning-making and shared social phenomena of professional learning explored for five secondary school teachers. Findings are accessed in two ways: narrative inquiry enables the construction of unique professional learning narratives and phenomenological inquiry proposes commonalities in the teachers’ experiences.

Selected examples from the study are used to explore what may be learnt from combining two interpretative methodologies within one study with limited references to the overall research findings.

These qualitative methodological designs and their implementation within one study have positive influences on the multifaceted nature of the construction of meaning-making in teacher professional learning. Furthermore, using two qualitative methodologies together provide insights on the study phenomena, in this instance, highlighting the personal aspect of expert teachers’ professional learning needs and the disruptive dissonance of ongoing problematics as central for the teachers throughout their professional learning.

This study offers one possibility for combining methodologies to access the meaning-making in teacher learning and one avenue for creating hermeneutic understanding in using the methods within this approach.

In this chapter, the process of doctoral research is discussed in relation to narrative inquiry. I was the doctoral supervisor for Cindy and Derek while they completed their PhDs. I examine in this chapter my experiences alongside Derek and Cindy. I consider the process of recruitment, field text collection and generation, the writing process, and considerations based on the methodology on narrative inquiry, with attention focused on the Deweyan ontology of experience, the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, co-composition of research texts, narrative threads, living and telling narrative inquiries, and the relational quality of narrative inquiry. This chapter closes with thoughts about who we are in relationship with each other in the graduate process and the fluid nature of research.

As shown in their earlier stories, while at differing times and places Janice and Mary searched for a research methodology that felt congruent with who they were each becoming and the inquiries they imagined, they both became drawn toward the relational aspects of narrative inquiry. As Clandinin and Connelly wrote: “Relationship is key to what it is that narrative inquirers do” (2000, p. 189). Key in negotiating relationships as narrative inquirers is our collective sharing of stories of experience. This relational storytelling shapes both shared vulnerability among storytellers as each person awakens to the complexity of lives being composed and recomposed and, too, a growing sense of working from, and with, stories as a way to shape personal, social, and institutional change (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Clandinin and Connelly (1998) describe this kind of narrative change as taking shape in the following ways:For us, the promise of storytelling emerges when we move beyond regarding a story as a fixed entity and engage in conversations with our stories. The mere telling of a story leaves it as a fixed entity. It is in the inquiry, in our conversations with each other, with texts, with situations, and with other stories that we can come to retelling our stories and to reliving them. (p. 251)Furthermore, Maenette Benham (2007) writes thatthe power of narrative is that, because it deeply explores the tensions of power by illuminating its collisions (e.g., differences of knowledge and practices), it reveals interesting questions that mobilize processes and resources that benefit native people and their communities. Indeed, the political impact of narrative cannot be dismissed. (pp. 513–514)

The purpose of this paper is to promote narrative inquiry as a legitimate and rich research approach for academics undertaking postgraduate studies in higher education learning and teaching.

This paper is framed within a personal narrative – one that draws upon the author's personal experience as an academic developer. It draws heavily on narrative theory to support its claims.

It is argued that when narrative inquiry is presented as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, other research approaches, uptake amongst diverse groups of academics is strong. Furthermore, it is suggested that when accompanied by personal engagement with narrative inquiry and presented within a theoretical framework that honours its history, its robust literature and highlights its fundamental purpose and unique qualities, the possibilities offered by narrative are more likely to be understood and embraced.

This paper is based upon the experience of one academic working within one university.

This paper highlights the possibilities offered by narrative inquiry as a research approach for diverse groups of teaching academics.