After reading D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly’s Narrative Inquiry, a piece exploring art, role, and focus of narrative inquirers, I am left reflecting upon a few, key excerpts that I found rather thought-provoking. Please allow me to present these quotes in bullet form followed by comments and thoughts in purple italics:
· Clandinin and Connelly focus on “four directions in inquiry: inward and outward, backward and forward. By inward, we mean toward internal conditions, such as feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions. By outward, we mean toward existential conditions, that is, the environment. By backward and forward, we refer to temporality— past, present, and future” (Narrative Inquiry 50).
I wonder if as narrative inquirers we tend to focus on the direction which comes naturally to us, often overlooking other directions. This thought occurred because while reading I asked myself if I focus on the four directions in my writing, in which I could answer no unless prompted or corrected. For me, I gravitate toward exploring the inward direction, exploring my feelings and emotions more so than that which impacts the situation externally. Having said this, I know when placed in groups to analyze a situation, others seem to have their preferences just as I do, so when combined each direction is covered thoroughly.
· “Ming Fang’s long-ago China stories and present-day Canadian ones help us, as Blaise (1993) suggests, ‘live in their countries, speak their language, negotiate their streets on their buses and turn out keys in their locks’” (Narrative Inquiry 54).
Blaise’s words are richly insightful! When reading accounts of others’ life, we are granted access to their culture. Through this access, we are just as her metaphor suggests unlocking new experiences through our combined memories.
· Clandinin and Connelly describe the concept of the Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space:
1) “We might imagine the terms as an analytic frame for reducing the stories to a set of understandings.”
2) Think of terms as “pointing to questions, puzzles, fieldwork, and field texts of different kinds of appropriate to different aspects of the inquiry.”
3) “A third use of the terms… is the ambiguity, complexity, difficulty, and uncertainties associated with the doing of inquiry” (Narrative Inquiry 54-55).
Admittedly, I tripped over many of the concepts presented in this section, because the concepts and language at times seemed abstract; however, my understanding of the Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry can be described in three paths: 1) an outline for understanding, 2) dialogue for understanding, and 3) rhetoric of understanding. I’m using the term rhetoric loosely to stand for those thoughts and questions that are often debated as to whether an answer exists.
· “I think sometimes when you feel strongly about things though, that it marginalizes you” (Narrative Inquiry 57).
I connected to this quote, for when I am passionate about something it shows in my tone, word choice, body language, and the like. While feeling strongly about something shows significance to me, it also shows an inability to be open-minded on the issue and therefore can have a negative connotation of making yourself insignificant to the conversation.
“What starts to become apparent as we work within our three-dimensional space is that as narrative inquirers we are not alone in the space. This space enfolds us and those who we werk. Narrative inquiry is relational inquiry as we work in the field, move from field to field text, and from field text to research text” (Narrative Inquiry 60).
Certainly, when writing as a narrative inquirer it is not only the author that constructs meaning, but the responses of the audience which have a strong potential to alter the meaning. In other words, narrative inquiry is socially constructed!
· “As narrative inquirers, we share our writing on a work-in-progress basis with response communities. By this, we mean that we ask others to read our work and to respond in ways that help us see other meanings that might lead to future retelling” (Narrative Inquiry 60).
As stated in response to the previous quote, meaning making is in part the author and in part the audience. Neither part can exist alone for true narrative inquiry, for it would lack the test of debate.
· “As inquires we, too, are part of the parade. We have helped make the world in which we find ourselves. We are not merely objective inquirers, people on the high road, who study a world lesser in quality than our moral temperament would have it, people who study a world we did not help create. On the contrary, we are complicit in the world we study. Being in this world, we need to remake ourselves as well as offer up research understandings that could lead to a better world” (Narrative Inquiry 61).
I will not speak for others, but I have become very aware that my writing exposes my thoughts, intelligence, and perspective among many other things. While I could cringe and edit my writing to appear impartial, it would take away the sincerity and transparency that is valued in writing. If everyone approaches the table of narrative inquiry as open books, there is no telling the understanding that could result!
· Working in this space means that we become visible with our own lived and told stories. Sometimes this means that our own unnamed, perhaps, secret, stories come to light as much as do those of our participants. This confronting of ourselves in our narrative past makes us vulnerable as inquirers because it makes secret stories public. In narrative inquiry, it is impossible (or if not impossible, then deliberately self deceptive) as researcher to stay silent or to present a kind of perfect, idealized, inquiring, moralizing self” (Narrative Inquiry 62).
As stated in the comment on the previous quote, there is a necessity for narrative inquirers to be transparent in their writing. If there is a chance of walking away from the stories and research with any new understanding, it is based upon the ability of everyone involved to ditch their socially acceptable mask and be real. There is not a single soul that is unprejudiced in some area or another, so let’s embrace our perceptions of the world in order to gain new insight!
· Clandinin and Connelly focus on “four directions in inquiry: inward and outward, backward and forward. By inward, we mean toward internal conditions, such as feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions. By outward, we mean toward existential conditions, that is, the environment. By backward and forward, we refer to temporality— past, present, and future” (Narrative Inquiry 50).
I wonder if as narrative inquirers we tend to focus on the direction which comes naturally to us, often overlooking other directions. This thought occurred because while reading I asked myself if I focus on the four directions in my writing, in which I could answer no unless prompted or corrected. For me, I gravitate toward exploring the inward direction, exploring my feelings and emotions more so than that which impacts the situation externally. Having said this, I know when placed in groups to analyze a situation, others seem to have their preferences just as I do, so when combined each direction is covered thoroughly.
· “Ming Fang’s long-ago China stories and present-day Canadian ones help us, as Blaise (1993) suggests, ‘live in their countries, speak their language, negotiate their streets on their buses and turn out keys in their locks’” (Narrative Inquiry 54).
Blaise’s words are richly insightful! When reading accounts of others’ life, we are granted access to their culture. Through this access, we are just as her metaphor suggests unlocking new experiences through our combined memories.
· Clandinin and Connelly describe the concept of the Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space:
1) “We might imagine the terms as an analytic frame for reducing the stories to a set of understandings.”
2) Think of terms as “pointing to questions, puzzles, fieldwork, and field texts of different kinds of appropriate to different aspects of the inquiry.”
3) “A third use of the terms… is the ambiguity, complexity, difficulty, and uncertainties associated with the doing of inquiry” (Narrative Inquiry 54-55).
Admittedly, I tripped over many of the concepts presented in this section, because the concepts and language at times seemed abstract; however, my understanding of the Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry can be described in three paths: 1) an outline for understanding, 2) dialogue for understanding, and 3) rhetoric of understanding. I’m using the term rhetoric loosely to stand for those thoughts and questions that are often debated as to whether an answer exists.
· “I think sometimes when you feel strongly about things though, that it marginalizes you” (Narrative Inquiry 57).
I connected to this quote, for when I am passionate about something it shows in my tone, word choice, body language, and the like. While feeling strongly about something shows significance to me, it also shows an inability to be open-minded on the issue and therefore can have a negative connotation of making yourself insignificant to the conversation.
“What starts to become apparent as we work within our three-dimensional space is that as narrative inquirers we are not alone in the space. This space enfolds us and those who we werk. Narrative inquiry is relational inquiry as we work in the field, move from field to field text, and from field text to research text” (Narrative Inquiry 60).
Certainly, when writing as a narrative inquirer it is not only the author that constructs meaning, but the responses of the audience which have a strong potential to alter the meaning. In other words, narrative inquiry is socially constructed!
· “As narrative inquirers, we share our writing on a work-in-progress basis with response communities. By this, we mean that we ask others to read our work and to respond in ways that help us see other meanings that might lead to future retelling” (Narrative Inquiry 60).
As stated in response to the previous quote, meaning making is in part the author and in part the audience. Neither part can exist alone for true narrative inquiry, for it would lack the test of debate.
· “As inquires we, too, are part of the parade. We have helped make the world in which we find ourselves. We are not merely objective inquirers, people on the high road, who study a world lesser in quality than our moral temperament would have it, people who study a world we did not help create. On the contrary, we are complicit in the world we study. Being in this world, we need to remake ourselves as well as offer up research understandings that could lead to a better world” (Narrative Inquiry 61).
I will not speak for others, but I have become very aware that my writing exposes my thoughts, intelligence, and perspective among many other things. While I could cringe and edit my writing to appear impartial, it would take away the sincerity and transparency that is valued in writing. If everyone approaches the table of narrative inquiry as open books, there is no telling the understanding that could result!
· Working in this space means that we become visible with our own lived and told stories. Sometimes this means that our own unnamed, perhaps, secret, stories come to light as much as do those of our participants. This confronting of ourselves in our narrative past makes us vulnerable as inquirers because it makes secret stories public. In narrative inquiry, it is impossible (or if not impossible, then deliberately self deceptive) as researcher to stay silent or to present a kind of perfect, idealized, inquiring, moralizing self” (Narrative Inquiry 62).
As stated in the comment on the previous quote, there is a necessity for narrative inquirers to be transparent in their writing. If there is a chance of walking away from the stories and research with any new understanding, it is based upon the ability of everyone involved to ditch their socially acceptable mask and be real. There is not a single soul that is unprejudiced in some area or another, so let’s embrace our perceptions of the world in order to gain new insight!