While reading “Situating Narrative Inquiry,” there were a few key excerpts that triggered something inside of me and cause me to create dialogue with the text.  Please allow me to present the quote and then offer my thoughts in purple italics:

    “So while researchers have new respect for the human in the subjects they study, they continue to perceive themselves as capable of being objective” (Situating Narrative Inquiry 11).
    “In this discourse, as researchers we continued to act in our role as researchers as if we were capable of remaining in some way intellectually and objectively separate from what we were studying— we did not remove the boundaries we had drawn around ourselves as researchers. We felt that in our role as researchers the self was unchangeable” (Situating Narrative Inquiry 12).
    We are not robots who view everything in one of two spheres: black or white. As humans we contradict the components necessary to be objective by dictionary definition. Certainly, we can try to base our decision on facts, yet we would be lying if we said our conclusions are “not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudices”  (dictionary.com).  Through considering the role of judge or jury, we as humans, even when “putting energy into maintaining an objective stance” ( 12) insert our own moral compass and experience before rendering a verdict. Therefore, I find it more credible to say “the researcher and the researched in a particular study are in relationship with each other and that the parties will learn and change in the encounter” ( 9) because “humans and human interaction exists in context” ( 11). Essentially for humans the objective lens is always accompanied by the subjective lens. 
    The previous paragraph was written when I had only read up until page 12, so when I made it through the complete reading, I was thrilled that the text was conversing with me and supporting my argument. This occurred on page 15 with the idea of the “implausibility of being truly distant” and again in the conclusion where the authors argue that you cannot dispose of the “nonneutrality of curiosity and interest” (29).  

    “[Piaget] focused not on numbering the answers but on the children’s explanations (words) about their understanding of particular events” (Situating Narrative Inquiry 16) – a quote in reference to the Stanford-Binet intelligence test.
    Student Teaching reinforced this concept for me. Children come at problems from all different angles, and while their answers on an objective test may be wrong, if asked to explain their reasoning in oral or written fashion, they often have perfectly intelligent logic. This goes to show that numbers cannot account for all reasons, for language must accompany those numbers.

     “When the audience is presented with numeric findings, the reader must provide a narrative to explain and capture the relationships presented with statistical values” (Situating Narrative Inquiry 20).
    “It is interesting to consider that not only should numbers be accompanied by words, but also words should be accompanied by numbers. As stated in the article, formulas, charts, graphs, and tables must be accompanied by words in order for relationships to be established and explained. Likewise, writing needs a sense of numbers, not in the traditional or literal sense, but in code. This code is known as sequence. Sequence words (first, next, then, last) serve the purpose of numbers in that they keep each occurrence “independent, interchangeable, and equal” (18).  The difference between numbers and words in my opinion is that in writing, words can ground sentences making them dependent, contradictory, and even disproportionate. I believe the key is to use numbers and words together only when they serve to complement one another and offer a better explanation than providing words or numbers alone.

    While my quotes are only concerned with the first two turns: 1) relationship of researcher and researched and 2) from numbers to words as data, I am not discounting the importance of turn 3) from the general to the particular of turn 4) blurring knowing. I will, however, say that turn 3 came as a given. Clearly more understanding comes from a more focused lens. Although, turn 4 I feel I still need some explanation of epistemology, or maybe I’m making too much of what I don’t completely understand and I do have a good grasp. Ultimately, I enjoyed this article for his depth and perspective despite its length.

    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!