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http://jte.sagepub.comJournal of Teacher Education

DOI: 10.1177/0022487106296218

2007; 58; 21Journal of Teacher Education D. Jean Clandinin, Debbie Pushor and Anne Murray Orr

Navigating Sites for Narrative Inquiry

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NAVIGATING SITES FOR NARRATIVE INQUIRY

D. Jean Clandinin

University of AlbertaDebbie Pushor

University of Saskatchewan

Anne Murray Orr

St. Francis Xavier University

Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators. However, this appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and disadvantages. Some assume narra-tive inquiries will be easy to design, live out, and represent in storied formats in journals, disserta-tions, or books. For the authors, though, narrative inquiry is much more than the telling of stories.There are complexities surrounding all phases of a narrative inquiry and, in this article, the authors pay particular attention to thinking about the design of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’and teacher educators’ own practices. They outline three commonplaces and eight design elements forconsideration in narrative inquiry. They illustrate these elements using recently completed narrativeinquiries. In this way, the authors show the complex dimensions of narrative inquiry, a kind of inquiry that requires particular kinds of wakefulness.

Keywords: commonplaces of narrative inquiry; ethics; narrative inquiry; representation;research design; research methodology; research methods; teacher education

Narrative inquiry is a methodology that fre-quently appeals to teachers and teacher educa-tors. Part of the appeal is, no doubt, the comfortthat comes from thinking about telling and lis-tening to stories. This comfort associated withnarratives and stories carries into a sense of comfort with research that attends to teachers’and teacher educators’ stories. However, thisappeal and sense of comfort has advantages anddisadvantages. Although it has appeal, someimmediately see it as an “easy” kind of researchand assume that narrative inquiries will be easyto design, live out, and represent in a storied for-mat in journals, dissertations, or books. Somesee narrative inquiry as “just telling stories.” Forus, and for many others (Clandinin et al., 2006;

Craig, 1992; Olson, 1993; Paokong & Rosiek,2003; Polkinghorne, 1988), narrative inquiry ismuch more than the telling of stories. The edi-tors of many journals, including the Journalof Teacher Education, are concerned with makingmore apparent the complexities surrounding allphases of a narrative inquiry; in this article, wetake on the challenge of paying particular atten-tion to thinking about the quality and impact of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’ andteacher educators’ own practices. Although wewant to encourage people to engage in narrativeinquiries into their own practices, we do want toshow the complex dimensions of such research,for narrative inquiry is a kind of inquiry thatrequires particular kinds of wakefulness.

Authors’ Note: We would like to acknowledge the reviewer’s (albeit anonymous) contribution to deepening and enrich-ing this conversation.

Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007 21-35DOI: 10.1177/0022487106296218© 2007 by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

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The term narrative inquiry was first used inthe educational research field by Connelly andClandinin (1990) in an article published inEducational Researcher. Their conceptualizationof narrative inquiry arises from a Deweyan

(1938) notion that life is education. Their inter-est, then, is in “lived experience—that is, in livesand how they are lived” (Clandinin & Connelly,2000, p. xxii). Although narrative inquiry “has along intellectual history both in and out of edu-cation” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2), priorto 1990 it had been thought about in ways suchas MacIntyre’s (1981) notion of narrative unity,Mitchell’s (1981) comprehensive presentation of the field of narratology, Polkinghorne’s (1988)understanding of narrative analysis, and Coles’s(1989) literary ideas of narrative. By building

from these notions, yet situating their conceptu-alization as narrative and inquiry, as phenome-non and method, Connelly and Clandinin(1990) established the educational importance of narrative inquiry as a research methodologythat brings “theoretical ideas about the nature of human life as lived to bear on educational expe-rience as lived” (p. 3).

As a way to begin to explore the complexitiesof narrative inquiry as research methodology, wefirst offer a definition of narrative inquiryand outline three commonplaces of narrative

inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). We then briefly describe two narrative inquiries under-taken by Murray Orr (2005) and Pushor (2001).Both are teacher educators, and their narrativeinquiries emerge from, and influence, theirteacher education practices. We then elaborateeight key elements that may be useful in thinkingabout conducting and representing narrativeinquiries. Pushor’s and Murray Orr’s studies areused to illuminate each of the eight elements.

A DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE INQUIRY

Although there are many ideas about whatresearchers and practitioners mean when theyuse the term narrative inquiry, we use the defin-ition offered by Connelly and Clandinin (2006).They wrote,

Arguments for the development and use of narrativeinquiry come out of a view of human experience in

which humans, individually and socially, lead sto-ried lives. People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret theirpast in terms of these stories. Story, in the currentidiom, is a portal through which a person enters theworld and by which their experience of the world is

interpreted and made personally meaningful.Viewed this way, narrative is the phenomenon stud-ied in inquiry. Narrative inquiry, the study of experi-ence as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as amethodology entails a view of the phenomenon. Touse narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a par-ticular narrative view of experience as phenomenaunder study. (p. 477)

Although narrative inquiry has been used instudies of community (Huber & Whelan, 2001),nursing (Barton, 2006), anthropology (Bateson,1994), occupational therapy (Mattingly, 2006),cross-cultural studies (Andrews, 2006) and manyothers, our interest in narrative inquiry in thisarticle is in how it has been taken up and used by teachers and teacher educators interested instudying and improving their own practices.

The field of narrative inquiry is still develop-ing. The Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology (Clandinin, 2006) offers a usefulguide to methodological undertakings and laysout helpful distinctions within the field of narra-tive inquiry. Although “narrative inquiry shares

features in common with other forms of qualita-tive inquiry such as the emphasis on the social inethnography and the use of story in phenome-nology” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 479), itis distinct from other methodologies. Connellyand Clandinin borrowed the notion of common-places from Schwab’s (1978) writing on curricu-lum to sort through and clarify the distinctqualities of narrative inquiry. Schwab developedfour commonplaces—teacher, learner, subjectmatter, and milieu—to deal with the complexityof curriculum. An adequate curriculum argu-

ment needed to deal with all four. What,Connelly and Clandinin wondered, would thecommonplaces of narrative inquiry be?

THE COMMONPLACES OF

NARRATIVE INQUIRY

In a similar spirit to the one they imaginedSchwab had in developing the commonplaces

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of curriculum, Connelly and Clandinin (2006)identified “three commonplaces of narrativeinquiry—temporality, sociality, and place—which specify dimensions of an inquiry space”(p. 479). They imagined them “in the spirit of

check points” (p. 479) or places to direct one’sattention in conducting a narrative inquiry.They provide a kind of conceptual frameworkfor narrative inquiry. However, “just as it wasfor Schwab in curriculum, the study of any oneor a combination of these three commonplacesmight well take place in some other form of qualitative inquiry” (Connelly & Clandinin,2006, p. 479). To undertake a narrative inquiry,there needs to be a “simultaneous explorationof all three commonplaces” (p. 479). We cannotfocus only on one to the exclusion of others.

Commonplace One: Temporality

“Events under study are in temporal transi-tion” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 479), thatis, events and people always have a past, pre-sent, and a future. In narrative inquiry it isimportant to always try to understand people,places, and events as in process, as always intransition.

Commonplace Two: Sociality

“Narrative inquirers are concerned with per-sonal conditions and, at the same time, withsocial conditions. By personal conditions wemean the feelings, hopes, desires, aestheticreactions, and moral dispositions” (Connelly &Clandinin, 2006, p. 480) of the inquirer andstudy participants. By social conditions theydraw attention to the existential conditions, theenvironment, surrounding factors and forces,people and otherwise, that form each individ-

ual’s context.Connelly and Clandinin (2006) specified

another dimension of the sociality common-place as the relationship between participantand inquirer. This is less important when one isfocused on one’s own practices as a teachereducator or teacher; however, it is very impor-tant in narrative inquiries where there are par-ticipants. In these cases “inquirers are always

in an inquiry relationship with participants’lives. We cannot subtract ourselves from rela-tionship” (p. 480).

Commonplace Three: Place

Again drawing on Connelly and Clandinin(2006), by place we mean “the specific concrete,physical and topological boundaries of placeor sequence of places where the inquiry andevents take place” (p. 480). As they noted, thekey to this commonplace is recognizing that“all events take place some place” (p. 481). Innarrative inquiry, “the specificity of location iscrucial. . . . Place may change as the inquirydelves into temporality” (p. 480) and a narra-tive inquirer needs to think through the impact

of each place on the experience.

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF TWO

NARRATIVE INQUIRIES

In this section we briefly describe two narra-tive inquiries, one conducted by Murray Orrand a second by Pushor. Both inquiries are partof a program of research into children’s,teachers’, parents’, and administrators’ lives asthey are composed and lived out on school

knowledge landscapes. They are shaped by theparticular narratives of experience of eachresearcher, the research puzzles, research con-texts, lives of research participants and theirown lives, and the field texts and research textsthat come out of, and constitute, each study.We briefly describe the studies here and revisitthem in more detail later in the article.

Murray Orr was a teacher in northernCanadian Aboriginal schools prior to beginningher research work. She brought questions aboutwhat it meant to teach children in ethically

responsive and responsible ways to her researchand to her imagined life as a teacher educator.Her doctoral research (Murray Orr, 2005) took upthese questions in a 2-year classroom-based nar-rative inquiry into the experiences of four first-and second-grade children who participated in aseries of book conversations with her. The fourchildren, students at a multicultural urban ele-mentary school in western Canada, gathered at

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lunchtime on Thursdays and with other studentsat other times during the school day. Throughtalk around children’s literature Murray Orr readaloud, and through other conversations thesechildren showed ways they were coming to

understand themselves as students, siblings,sons and daughters, and friends. The children’sperspectives on themselves were sometimes intension with the stories being told of them asstudents in school. Stories of each of the fourchildren challenged, unsettled, encouraged, andinspired Murray Orr as she began to composestories to live by (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) asa new teacher educator. She laid stories of herknowing of each of these children alongsideher experiences in the first years of her work inteacher education, seeing resonances as some of

the tensions experienced by preservice teacherscalled to mind tensions in the lives of thechildren. Her narrative inquiry helped her theo-rize teacher education as a space to continue theconversation, to engage preservice teachers ininquiries, to keep at the work of composing shift-ing stories to live by.

Pushor’s wonders from her work as a teacher,principal, and supervisor also shaped her doc-toral research puzzle. However, it was the dispo-sitioning she experienced from her vantage pointof parent that framed her research puzzle and

eventually framed her interest in how parentswere seen within teacher education. For her year-long narrative inquiry into parents’ positioningin relation to the landscape of schools (Pushor,2001), Pushor joined Gardenview School, a largewestern Canadian suburban elementary school.As a participant observer, she became part of school life as a staff member, parent, and narra-tive inquirer. As she heard stories of multiple par-ticipants, lived and told from multiple vantagepoints on the school landscape, she attended toparents’ experiences, particularly to their experi-ences of the structure of schooling. In this way,she developed a metaphor of a protectorate to con-ceptualize how educators, as holders of profes-sional knowledge about teaching and learning,assumed ownership of the ground of school,establishing programs, policies, and proceduresin the interests of children and their families.Pushor made problematic educators’ tendenciesto “see things small [by] look[ing] at schooling

through the lenses of a system” (Greene, 1995,p. 11). As she listened to stories of parents’ expe-riences, she imagined how the positioning of parents might be shifted or the landscape of schools changed if educators also “[saw] things

big, bring[ing] [them] in close contact with detailsand particularities” (p. 10). What would thelandscape of schools be like if details and partic-ularities of children’s and parents’ lives becamefocal points in the development and living outof programs, policies, and procedures and if children and parents had voice and place in suchdecision making? In her work as teacher educa-tor her stories and the stories of Gardenviewparents continued to trouble her practices as shesought ways to help preservice teachers imaginechanged landscapes in which parents’ know-

ledge was also valued. As a teacher educator, she brought forward stories from her inquiry to theo-rize new ways of imagining school landscapesand of helping preservice teachers imagine whothey might be in relation to parents on thoselandscapes.

A FRAMEWORK OF ELEMENTS FOR

DESIGNING, LIVING OUT, AND

REPRESENTING NARRATIVE INQUIRIES

In what follows we propose a list of elements

to consider in designing a narrative inquiry, inliving in the field and composing field texts,and in interpreting and writing research texts(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). We think aboutthese elements as a set of questions to ask our-selves at each phase of a narrative inquiry. Theseelements guide the conversations Connelly andClandinin engage in with their master’s anddoctoral students as they work through theirinquiries. However, they also work well as wethink about how we might undertake, livethrough, and write about our narrative inquiriesin research texts. As we work through the ele-ments, it is important to remember the com-monplaces and how they shape each response.

1. A central element in narrative inquiry, as inother forms of inquiry, is the justification, thereasons why the study is important. Narrativeinquirers need to attend to three kinds of justifi-cation: the personal, the practical, and the social.The personal justification comes from the





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importance, in narrative inquiries, of situatingyourself in the study. We do that by writingsomething we call narrative beginnings thatspeak to the researcher’s relationship to, andinterest in, the inquiry. Sometimes narrative

inquirers write only a personal justification.Although this justification is important, we alsoneed to justify the research practically, that is,how will it be insightful to changing or thinkingdifferently about the researcher’s own and oth-ers’ practices? The third justification requires aresearcher to think about the larger social andeducational issues the study might address. Insome ways the practical and social justificationspoint researchers toward an inquiry’s end point,that is, to being able to answer the “So what?”and “Who cares?” questions.

Pushor’s and Murray Orr ’s personal justifi-cations differed. Whereas Pushor came to herinquiry as a result of her positioning as parent,Murray Orr came to hers positioned as teacher.Prior to beginning her narrative inquiry, Pushor’sknowledge did not prepare her for her experi-ence as a parent on her eldest son, Cohen’s, firstday of school. As Pushor told stories of her expe-riences as a parent, struggled to make sense of theemotions they evoked in her, came to see howmuch the familiar school landscape became for-eign to her when she was positioned as a parent,

her personal relationship to, and interest in, hernarrative inquiry were shaped.

Murray Orr wrote of experiences in her ownschooling and in the schools and classroomswhere she was a teacher, experiences in whichchildren seemed to be positioned narrowly asgood students, poor students, or perhapsstudents who resisted instruction. Her lived sto-ries provided a desire to create spaces in whichchildren could tell diverse stories to live by otherthan ones shaped by narrow plotlines asstudents. As a teacher educator, Murray Orrfound further justification as she visited the class-rooms of preservice teachers and caught fleetingglimpses of such spaces, rarely sustained.

Just as the personal justifications for Pushor’sand Murray Orr’s narrative inquiries differed,so too did their practical justifications. Pushor’spractical justification arose out of the telling andretelling of her parent stories. As other parentsresponded to her stories, she recognized these

were not only her stories. As she receivedresponses from her teacher and principal col-leagues, Pushor awoke to the practical justifica-tion of her narrative inquiry—of how theinquiry may be insightful in changing or caus-

ing a shift in not only her practice but also inother educators’ practices. As a teacher educa-tor, Pushor considered how there is often littlespace in teacher education for attending to rela-tionships with parents.

For Murray Orr, although she intended in hermaster’s research to focus on facilitating criticaland creative thinking through conversationaround children’s literature (2002), she foundthe books often provided openings for conver-sational spaces with children that encouragedtellings and retellings of their stories to live by.

Students seemed to use these book conversa-tions as spaces to negotiate their identities. As a beginning teacher educator, Murray Orr recog-nized children’s literature might also providesuch spaces for preservice teachers. Her practi-cal justification, then, arose from her eagernessto explore the possibilities book conversationsmight provide in creating transformative spacesfor students and for her.

The social justification for Pushor’s andMurray Orr’s narrative inquiries arose out of questions not being explored in other research

studies, questions that moved to considerations of “So what?” and “Who cares?” within teacher edu-cation. For Pushor, it was in the consideration of how her parent stories were awakening her andother educators to parents’ lack of place and voiceon school landscapes that the social justificationemerged. For Murray Orr’s inquiry, the social jus-tification arose out of her attention to how the cul-tural, social, and institutional narratives in whichchildren, teacher, and she, as researcher, wereembedded shaped their identities.

2. A second element is the need to name thephenomenon, the “what” we are inquiring into.Partly the phenomenon becomes clear as theresearch puzzle and personal justification aredeveloped. An added complexity in narrativeinquiry, however, is that, no matter what the phe-nomenon, a narrative inquirer always adopts anarrative view of the phenomenon.

Through living, telling, and retelling theirstories, Murray Orr and Pushor began to think





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narratively about their phenomena—a narrativeview extended over time, shaped by personaland social conditions, and situated, correspond-ingly, in a multiplicity of places. In the followingedited excerpt from her dissertation, Murray

Orr (2005) wrote about a child, Calvin, whoresisted her best efforts to teach him, in a storythat caused her to puzzle over how students arepositioned in schools, and how difficult it is toshift these positionings when they are in place.

The late afternoon sun glinted on the wings of thesmall plane that brought me to the tiny aboriginalcommunity of Willow Lake, in northern Canada,accessible only by plane or by ice road for a brief period in the winter. As I disembarked with myhusband, Jeff, I looked around at the children whohad come to the airstrip to see the new teachers.

Smiling faces, friendly welcoming words, helpfulhands carried some of our luggage the short dis-tance to the teacherage, a house provided forteachers by the federal Department of Indian andNorthern Affairs. I was a first year teacher, far fromhome, beginning a new chapter of my life.

A little boy named Calvin walked hesitantly intomy Grade 2 classroom a few days after schoolstarted. He looked too small to be there, but hisname was on my register. He wore a faded, not veryclean plaid shirt with the buttons done up wrong,and a pair of very worn little jeans. Calvin’s long hairwreathed his head in tangled disarray, framing asmall, sombre face from which big shining eyes

gazed up at me as I smiled and introduced myself.Calvin did not say anything as I led him to the seatin the middle row of the classroom which I hadassigned to him. As we continued the math lesson,Calvin sat, stiff and silent, staring out the window.

Calvin continued to arrive at school at unpre-dictable times over the next few weeks. He wouldcome in and sit quietly, not participating in class atall. I soon discovered from the other children thatCalvin lived on the edge of town in a tiny house withhis grandfather, and that he was behind his class-mates in school. While fluent in Dene, his first lan-guage and the language of the community, Calvindid not speak much English at all. And English was,

of course, the language of instruction in schools,something I did not question at that time. I tried toinvolve Calvin in class activities, to have him takepart in the lessons that I worked so hard to prepare.He remained silent and uninvolved. I placed simpleworksheets that I thought he could complete on hisdesk, so that he could work on these while the rest of the class was busily engaged at centres or in otheractivities. He left them untouched. I spoke kindly toCalvin, encouraging him to complete at least one

worksheet. He would occasionally take a pencil andscribble on the page. I was unaware of how inade-quate and inappropriate my actions were.

One day in early October, Calvin sat at his desk asusual, silently staring out the window. It was nearlylunchtime and I approached his desk, quietly asking

him to do just a little work before the bell rang. Hesuddenly erupted out of his desk, yelling in Dene,and ran to the back of the classroom, where he began

beating on the wall in unrestrained fury. I ran to the back and tried to calm him, speaking my Englishwords that I hoped were soothing. This seemed tomake things worse, and Calvin began to cry, great,hoarse sobs tearing from his throat. I reached forCalvin to try to comfort him. He twisted away fromme and tore from the classroom. He did not returnduring that school year.

Sometimes I would see him in his yard, as Jeff andI went for walks around the community that fall andwinter. I would smile and wave; Calvin would gaze

at me with those solemn eyes, unsmiling and silent.I wondered what had gone wrong. Why hadn’tthings worked out for Calvin in my class?

Fifteen years later, I consider why this story of Calvin is with me after such a long time. I still clearlysee his face and picture the day he left my classroom.I lived in northern Canada for eight years after thatfall and gradually learned something of life in a Denecommunity, about the context from which Calvincame to school. When winter arrived and the lakeswere frozen, some of the Dene families, Calvin’sincluded, left the small community on the southeast-ern side of the large lake and travelled by snowmo-

bile or sometimes dogsled to their trapline cabins to

the north. The teachers of our school took turnsweekly going up to the trapline to visit and teach. Onthe trapline, families lived in small cabins andtrapped and hunted, as the Dene had done for count-less years in this area. There were clusters of two orthree cabins on the edges of each lake scatteredthroughout the region, just south of the tree line. Thechildren found it funny to see us out of our usualschool context, and families were unfailingly wel-coming. My friends in the community and thechildren I knew talked about feeling happier and athome when they were up on the trapline. There wasusually enough food and always work to do, as thecaribou and smaller animals were used in a wide

variety of ways. Calvin came to school from a homelife that prepared him well for trapping, hunting,mending a snowmobile, living on the land with inde-pendence and ingenuity. What happened whenCalvin came to school from this story of a life lived onthe land? His story bumped up against the story of school that I knew, as a beginning teacher who wasunaware of many things, such as the importance of the cultural experiences of the children in my class. Intime, I gradually began to learn to welcome and





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attend to those experiences more fully, although I amsurely still learning. I continue to ponder the manypossible readings of this story of Calvin. (pp. 1-4, 5)

As this excerpt illustrates, in telling and retel-ling this story—and others—from several per-spectives, Murray Orr framed her phenomenonnarratively as how students tell and retell theirstories to live by within the context of theirpositioning on school landscapes. This narrativeview of the phenomenon of identity makingallowed her to attend to people, places, andevents as in process. As a teacher educator,Murray Orr’s inquiry into this phenomenoncontinues to shape her practice, as she sees theimportance of awakening teachers to children’scomposing of their stories to live by in school.

For Pushor, it was out of telling and retellingstories of her experiences of her son’s entry intothe school system that she began to develop anarrative view of her inquiry phenomenon. Intelling her stories, in listening to stories told toher in response, and in listening to how othersmade sense of her experiences, Pushor moved backward and forward in time, inward and out-ward between the personal and social, and tothe place of many school landscapes. In thisway, she came to understand her phenomenonnarratively and to name it as “the positioning of

parents in relation to school landscapes.” Just asMurray Orr’s inquiry into her phenomenoncontinues to shape her practice as a teacher edu-cator, so too does Pushor’s. As attention toparents’ voice and place on school landscapes isvirtually absent in teacher education programs,Pushor’s attention to the positioning of parentsis woven through the curriculum of her courses.

3. A third element is to consider and todescribe the particular methods used to study thephenomenon. Narrative inquirers address this intwo ways. First, we engage in imaginatively

thinking about the chosen puzzle, “along withpossible participants, as existing in an ever shift-ing space” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 481).A first task, then, for narrative inquirers is tothink of their inquiry phenomenon, topic,puzzle, and participants as occurring in a“multidimensioned, ever changing life space.To plan a narrative inquiry is to plan to be self

consciously aware of everything happeningwithin that life space” (p. 481). Second, think-ing about method also means figuring out anddescribing the kind of field texts (narrativeinquirers’ term for data) we need to collect and

compose. Thinking at the outset of the inquiryabout the collection and composition of fieldtexts needed helps us make decisions at eachphase. However, again, these decisions need to be undertaken with care to how the kinds of field texts are attentive to all three common-places, that is, temporality, sociality, and place.

Taking the importance of imaginatively think-ing about her study and how it might unfoldin the “multidimensioned, ever changing lifespace” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 481) of the classroom and school within which she was

tentatively negotiating a place for herself,Murray Orr thought first about ways to comealongside and cultivate relationships with theteacher and students in the classroom. She imag-ined facilitating a lunchtime book club with sixgirls as participants. However, as she moved intothe classroom, she realized what she imaginedwould need to shift as she learned more aboutthe teacher’s stories to live by and met thechildren. The number, gender, and age of herparticipants shifted from her first imaginedgroup. The study unfolded through imagining,

and reimagining, a reflexive and reflective backand forthing as lives changed and the contextchanged as Murray Orr moved into the midstand came to know her participants.

Pushor also engaged in imaginative thinkingabout her inquiry using Clandinin and Connelly’s(1998b) metaphor of a parade as a way to concep-tualize the ever-shifting life space of a school’sprofessional knowledge landscape. They wrote:

Each participant in the landscape, in the parade,has a particular place and a particular set of stories

being lived out at any particular time. Our influ-ence in the landscape, in the parade, is uncertain.We cannot easily anticipate how our presence, ourinnovations, our stories, will influence other sto-ries. The parade proceeds whether we wish it to ornot. (p. 161)

At first Pushor imagined herself as joining inGardenview School’s parade, following their





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route, attending to temporality, sociality, andplace as she walked alongside school partici-pants. In this way she realized what field textsshe would need. By listening to participants’ sto-ries, by telling her own, and by interconnecting

these stories, she would come to know the nar-rative map of their parade. In her imagined plan-ning she recognized her presence in the parade,having her life touch others’ lives, would shiftthe parade in known and as yet unknown ways.

As she began to live out her narrative inquiry,she attended to how the multiplicity of her storiesto live by as mother, daughter, teacher, principal,and so on was layered with another multiplicityaround her positioning or vantage points on theschool landscape. As she lived out the study sheattended to how these multiple vantage points

shifted, sometimes within a single conversationor event. She realized she needed to composeintensive field notes, wakeful to who she was,and who others saw her as, within each conver-sation or event. These field notes became animportant part of her field texts, field textsshaped by her multiple vantage points. As astaff “member,” Pushor participated in activi-ties such as staff meetings and staffroom life.As a “member” of the parent community, sheattended, for example, school council meetings,hot lunch days, and had coffee with parents. Her

field texts included field notes on all of this; how-ever, she also jotted down things she wasreminded of from her own experience, as well asreadings and things for further reflection. Herfield texts included field notes; staff, parent, andschool correspondence; monthly school andclassroom newsletters; minutes of meetings; pho-tographs of the school, people, and events; per-sonal correspondence; and transcripts of tapedconversations.

Murray Orr’s field texts were collected andcomposed when she was positioned alongsidethe children in the classroom and school. Shemade minimal notes in the moment, and later, athome on her computer, she wrote of the day’sevents in as much detail as she could recall. Shealso had audiotaped conversations with thechildren around the books they read and tapedweekly conversations with the teacher as theydiscussed the students’ curricular experiences.She collected documents such as children’s art

and writing and biweekly letters from theteacher to parents. Murray Orr composed andcollected these field texts attentive to temporal-ity, sociality, and place.

4. A fourth design element to be described in

research texts is the analysis and interpretationprocesses. Although there are many ways tothink about the move from field texts to researchtexts, that is, the papers, books, dissertations to be made public, all forms of narrative inquiryemphasize that considering the contextual andrelational are important. This element drawsattention to the importance of “defining and balancing the commonplaces” (Connelly &Clandinin, 2006, p. 482), that is, to how we exam-ine, describe, and specify the commonplace fea-tures built into the study.

Pushor and Murray Orr found the narrativeinquiry commonplaces an important scaffoldfor analysis and interpretation in their inquiries.Through attending to these commonplaces, amove for Pushor to unanticipated times, places,and spaces was evoked during analysis andinterpretation processes. For example, duringher year-long inquiry at Gardenview School,parent advocacy for increased funding of publiceducation became a strong local movement. Inwondering if the role of advocacy was a changein the positioning of parents, and if parents were

finding a place for their knowledge, voice, andparticipation in decision making in this advo-cacy campaign, Pushor moved backward andforward in time, inward and outward in relationto the personal and the social, and explored theplace of Gardenview in relation to the local andprovincial landscape. In this way, Pushor used aprocess of analysis that drew deeply on the nar-rative inquiry commonplaces as a frameworkfor her interpretation of her field texts.

The move from field texts to research textswas not a smooth linear transition for MurrayOrr. She began to write pieces drawing on fieldnotes and transcripts only 8 months into herresearch. However, she also continued to returnto the school to compose more field texts dur-ing the next year. This overlapping of differentkinds of writing helped Murray Orr see thecommonplaces from multiple perspectives. As ateacher educator, she saw the need for an inter-pretation of the field texts that brought forward





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the importance of the relational in her conver-sations with children. Murray Orr described heruse of the commonplaces to structure the analy-sis in her research text and returned to the com-monplaces throughout her research text, making

her use of this framework visible to the reader.5. A fifth element is the positioning narrativeinquirers do as they position their studies in rela-tion to other research on a particular phenome-non, to related programs of research, and toresearch undertaken using different epistemolog-ical and ontological assumptions. This position-ing is similar to what all researchers do in theirliterature reviews. Sometimes, however, narra-tive inquirers act as if there is no need for posi-tioning their work relative to other research.

Pushor and Murray Orr read in areas specific

to their inquiry puzzles. The conceptualizationof involvement, and the lack of challenge to thisconceptualization, troubled Pushor when sheread in the literature of parent involvement.Needing another literature to help her thinkabout transforming school landscapes, sheturned to the research on teacher knowledge.

Murray Orr used Greene’s conception of “seeing big and seeing small” as a literature thathelped her consider how to create spaces in herteacher education courses where attention to theparticularities of each person would enable pre-

service teachers to bring in their stories to live by and, correspondingly, be awake to invitingchildren to do the same. Similarly, Greene’s(1995) conception helped Pushor imagine pay-ing particular attention to parents on schoollandscapes and to awaken preservice teachers toseeing parents “big.”

A second way of positioning is to see that,for example, there are multiple programs of research within each area. It is important for nar-rative inquirers to position their work in relationto other programs of research. Conceptually,Pushor and Murray Orr ground their narrativeinquiries in a Deweyan view of experience, aview that acknowledges the embodiment of theperson in the world and that focuses on not onlythe individual’s experience but also on the social,cultural, and institutional narratives in whichthe individual’s experiences are constituted,shaped, expressed, and enacted.

In relation to multiple programs of researchwithin an area, Pushor positioned her inquiryinto parent knowledge within a large body of literature on parents, and alongside the workof other researchers who consider how parents

participate or are engaged on school land-scapes in ways that are relational and recipro-cal (Benson, 1999; Cairney & Munsie, 1992;Edwards, Pleasants, & Franklin, 1999; Shockley,Michalove, & Allen, 1995; Taylor, 1997; Taylor &Dorsey-Gaines, 1988). Her research grows out of a narrative view of experiential knowledge, par-ticularly the work on teachers’ personal practicalknowledge (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1983;Grimmett & McKinnon, 1992). Her study high-lights that parents too can be seen as holders andconstructors of knowledge about children, teach-

ing, and learning.Murray Orr’s research is also positioned

within a narrative view of experiential knowl-edge. However, she is also trying to understandthe interconnections between children’s identitymaking and their contexts. Because children’sexperience with literature is an intense researchfocus, she drew on others’ work in this field (Blair& Sanford, 2004; Galda, 1998). Furthermore, because her research interest is as a teachereducator, she also positioned her work along-side the literature on dilemmas in teacher

education (Britzman, 1986; Florio-Ruane, 2001;Hinchman & Oyler, 2000). She did this by con-necting threads from stories in her research tothe literature. For example, she connected thechildren’s stories of strong family and culturalties with the knowing that preservice teachers bring to the teacher education program(Battiste, 1998; Hinchman & Oyler, 2000;Pushor & Murphy, 2004).

A third positioning is to position our narrativeinquiries in relation to other forms of inquiry.Clandinin and Rosiek (2006) offered a mappingof the methodological landscape in which theyexplore the conceptual roots of narrative inquiryalongside the philosophical assumptions thatunderlie other forms of scholarship. The bordersand borderlands among narrative inquiry, post-positivist, poststructuralist, and critical theoryforms of research are mapped. This positioning isimportant for narrative inquirers even if they do





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not want to explore the philosophical assump-tions in great detail.

These multiple ways of positioning ourwork in relation to other work are all impor-tant. The answer to which literatures we posi-

tion our work in relation to is given by notingwhat conversations we most want to joinwithin the larger conversations of teaching andteacher education.

6. A sixth design element, the uniqueness of each study, allows narrative inquirers to offersome sense of what it is that can be known abouta phenomenon that could not be known, at leastin the same way, by other theories, methods, orlines of work.

Pushor’s and Murray Orr’s studies offer dis-tinctive lenses through which they inquire into

their respective phenomena. For Pushor, thisuniqueness involved a different way of concep-tualizing and representing parent knowledge. Inmuch of the research literature around parents,research is conceptualized as research on parentsrather than research with parents. Research thuspresents researchers’ stories of parents, ratherthan parents’ stories. In Pushor’s narrativeinquiry, parents’ voices are heard telling stories of their experiences with their children’s schooling,and their stories are laid alongside the stories of educators. This multiplicity of narratives invites a

broader and more representative understandingof the complexity of school landscapes and of thepositioning of parents on those landscapes. Thisnarrative way of looking at parent knowledgeoffers different viewpoints often not heard inschool communities.

Murray Orr’s inquiry used a unique per-spective on book conversations with children.The literacy instruction research aroundstudent talk about books in the classroomtends to focus on goals such as improvement of comprehension (Miller, 2002) and creatingmore motivated readers (Fountas & Pinnell,2001). Although these are important aims,Murray Orr’s narrative inquiry, coming along-side four children in book conversations,enabled her to understand their composingand recomposing of their stories to live by. Byfocusing narratively on the children’s stories asthey told and retold them, Murray Orr was

able to propose ways children used the booksto shift their stories to live by and to invitereaders of her research text to consider bookconversations as spaces where children mayengage in the work of identity making. Thus,

her narrative inquiry provided a unique con-ceptualization of book conversations.7. Ethical considerations, a seventh element,

are central in narrative inquiries. Although ethi-cal review is mandatory for all research withhuman participants the relational ethics of nar-rative inquiry need special consideration.

In narrative inquiry, inquirers must deepen the senseof what it means to live in relation in an ethicalway. . . . Ethical considerations permeate narrativeinquiries from start to finish: at the outset as ends-in-view are imagined; as inquirer-participant relation-

ships unfold, and as participants are represented inresearch texts. (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 483)

Although Pushor was no longer engaged regu-larly at her inquiry site when she wrote herresearch text, and Murray Orr was returningonly every few months to hers, their participantscontinued to “live” with them as they read andreread field texts and wrote of their researchexperiences. Each story they chose to tell, orchose not to tell, each word they selected for theretelling, or rejected for the retelling, they did

in their participants’ imagined presence. Pushorand Murray Orr considered how participantsmight read their words, how vulnerable theywere making them, and how their way of seeinga story might align with, or differ from, their par-ticipants. Pushor and Murray Orr came to knowand care deeply for each individual engaged intheir narrative inquiries. Relationships devel-oped, trust formed, experiences were shared,stories were told, the ways lives became con-nected with one another evoked an “ethic of care” (Noddings, 1992) well beyond the ethicalconsiderations called for in formal processes andin signed commitments to protect participantsfrom harm.

Pushor negotiated her research texts with herparticipants to ensure she re-presented theirvoices and stories in resonant ways. In thesenegotiations, she received responses that weresometimes affirming and sometimes disrupting.





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inquirers think of many different textual formsreflective “of the shapes lives take” (Connelly& Clandinin, 2006, p. 485). Inquirers sometimesdraw on favorite literary forms. We see thisnarrative process of considering and choosing

textual forms in the ways Pushor selected therepresentational form that structured herresearch text. Although she had no predeter-mined representational form, she did have astrong photographic image of her son on hisfirst day of kindergarten. From her narrative beginnings, she pulled forward that image of her son and herself in that time and place andused it to shape the form of her research text.What she eventually selected, a metaphor of a photo album, allowed her to continue to check back with the commonplaces of temporality,

sociality, and place.Borrowing from a favorite novel, Margaret

Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), Pushor workedout the entailments of her metaphor of photoalbum and created word Snapshots to portraymoments in her inquiry experience. She did notwant to lose the sense of unfolding temporalityas she then created “Memorybank Movies” thatenlarged the snapshots with stories that toldwhat was not visible and what was not audiblein the snapshots. In this way she moved to con-siderations of place and the personal and social.

She created pieces that “Look[ed] Beyond theImages,” the stilled and the moving, to connectthe personal of each moment to the larger socialand research context that illuminated the posi-tioning of parents on the landscape of schools.Moving through photo album pages allowedPushor to share the past, present, and future of events, people, and places as always in transi-tion. In the “Snapshots,” the stilled images, shecaptured the place of each particular moment. Inthe “Memorybank Movies,” she highlighted her“feelings, hopes, desires, aesthetic reactions, andmoral dispositions” (Connelly & Clandinin,2006, p. 480) and often those of participants. Bymoving to “Looking Beyond the Images,”Pushor linked the personal to the social—thinking about the inquiry in relation tothe broader educational and research land-scape, the current provincial and politicallandscape, and the bodies of literature on

parent involvement, teacher knowledge, andteacher education.

Third, “the writing of a research text is a nar-rative act” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 485).We see this in the ways Pushor and Murray Orr

undertook their tasks. However, it also suggeststhat, in a different time, in a different social situ-ation, and for different purposes, a differentresearch text might be written. As Pushor andMurray Orr look back on their research theyawaken to how they understand it differently asthey now work full time in teacher educationsettings. As they speak to preservice teachers,cooperating teachers, school principals, andparents, they write and talk about their researchin slightly different ways.

Fourth, questions of audience are very sig-

nificant for narrative inquirers. As suggestedabove, there are multiple audiences—theinquirer himself or herself, other participants,and an imagined reading audience.

Research texts that emphasize one to the exclusionof others lose impact. Inquirers who forget theirparticipants and their readers and write only forthemselves, become narcissistic; inquirers whowrite for imagined audiences and neglect their par-ticipants could be unethical; and inquirers whowrite only for self and/or participants may beunable to answer the questions “Who cares?” and“So what?” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 485)

Conscious of her imagined reading audienceas she wrote her letters from the field to ateacher educator, Murray Orr created a way topull forward aspects of the study relevant toteaching and teacher education. She wrote aboutthe personal and about what mattered to ateacher educator. However, she also held herparticipants in her mind. As she wrote, she vis-ited the school, at first for several days eachweek and then much less frequently when she began work as a teacher educator thousands of miles away. However, she knew from the out-set she would negotiate these texts with thechildren and, as she returned, she took herdeveloping research texts back to the children.The children, then, were always in her mind,a constant presence as she imagined sharingher research texts about them with them asaudience.





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Pushor also kept her various audiences inmind as she wrote her metaphoric photo album.She imagined herself sitting together with var-ious readers—perhaps a parent, teacher, schoolleader, teacher educator—flipping backward

and forward through the pages as she sharedher photo album.Fifth, as research texts are composed, inquir-

ers need to be aware of the criteria by whichwork may be judged. Judgment criteria arestill under development in narrative inquiry.Connelly and Clandinin (2006) suggested thethree commonplaces, and these eight design ele-ments will be helpful in setting criteria for read-ers. They also wrote about “good narrative ashaving authenticity, as having adequacy andplausibility” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 185).

These are “criteria that put the emphasis on rec-ognizability of the field in research text” (p. 184).Others suggest resonance as a criterion for judg-ment (Hoffman, 1994), a criterion used byPushor and Murray Orr. Comments from theirreaders expressing how they saw or heardthemselves in the writers’ narratives speak tohow important resonance with readers is as away of illuminating new ways of thinking aboutexperience. As Murray Orr inquired into theways children were composing their stories tolive by, she worked to represent children’s iden-

tity making in ways that invite readers to findresonances in their practices. Similarly, Pushor’sparent stories call readers to lay their own sto-ries of parent knowledge alongside hers.

Sixth, narrative inquirers also need to bealways attentive to, and “make explicit, thesocial significance of their work and the larger body of literature to which their inquiry makesa contribution” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006,p. 485). This sixth consideration takes us full cir-cle back to questions of “So what?” and “Whocares?” It is important that narrative inquirersattend closely to these matters and think care-fully about the research and practice conversa-tions they want to join in with their work.Considering the work of other researchers inthese conversations, their standpoints and the-oretical frameworks, and what is alreadyknown about a particular topic is also crucialwork that narrative inquirers need to do in

their research texts if they want to occupy asignificant place in shaping the discourse of policy and practice in an area.

SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS

Our outline of the eight elements constitut-ing a framework for designing, living out, andrepresenting narrative inquiries allows us tocircle back to our initial comments about theappeal and sense of comfort teachers andteacher educators may find in research thatattends to stories of our experiences. We hopewe have highlighted that narrative inquiry is adeliberative research process founded on a setof ontological, epistemological, and method-ological assumptions that are at play from the

first narrative imaginings of a research puzzlethrough to the representation of the narrativeinquiry in research text.

As Connelly and Clandinin (1998a) wrote in“Asking Questions About Telling Stories,”telling stories is not enough. We need to moveto the retelling and reliving of stories, that is, toinquiry into stories. Narrative inquiry requiresattention to narrative conceptualizations asphenomenon and method, and to the interplayof the three commonplaces of temporality,sociality, and place in the inquiry process. It

requires particular kinds of wakefulness to theeight elements delineated in this article and tothe particular kinds of complexities those ele-ments raise in the research process.

We feel it is important to carefully considerthe comfort teachers and teacher educators feelwith research that attends to stories. Stories arethe form in which we and other teachers andteacher educators most often represent ourexperiences. Stories, ripe with possibility forinquiry, surround and envelope us as teachersand teacher educators. They are the woven fab-ric of school landscapes. Moving from tellingstories of our teaching practices to narrativelyinquiring into our teaching practices situatesteachers and teacher educators in the knownand the familiar while it asks us to make theknown and the familiar strange and open tonew possibility. Teachers and teacher educatorshave an opportunity to come to understand





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more fully our school landscapes and ourselvesas shaping and shaped by these landscapes, andthus, to shift our practices in relation to teachingand learning, teachers and students, parentsand families, and curriculum making. Perhaps

we can even change school landscapes.

NOTE

1. In response to an earlier draft of this article, one reviewervery thoughtfully and articulately wrote,

The issue [of ethics] was well situated in the text but I wasleft wondering about the questions posed, “Have I doneenough to support this child?” and, “In schools and class-rooms, how do we live ethically . . . ?”, such that althoughthe questions and issues were reasonable, they were cer-tainly not answerable. Hence, is it more a matter of keep-ing such questions to the forefront that matters, or is it infact seeking to respond? I am not suggesting one or the

other is correct, but rather that it raises an interestingpoint for further consideration because, in one sense, it

begins to highlight the sometimes overlooked clash between the research, the researched and the researcher.

Like the questions we posed, we find the reviewer’s questionsreasonable and indeed complex. They are questions of greatimportance for every narrative inquirer to grapple with.

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D. Jean Clandinin is professor and director of theCentre for Research for Teacher Education andDevelopment at the University of Alberta. She is a formerteacher, counselor, and psychologist. She coauthored manychapters, articles, and several books, including NarrativeInquiry (2000) and Composing Diverse Identities:Narrative Inquiries Into the Interwoven Lives of Children and Teachers (2006). She is part of an ongoinginquiry into teacher knowledge and teachers’ professional

knowledge landscapes. She is past vice president of Division B of American Educational Research Association(AERA). She received the AERA’s Early Career Award(1993) and Division B Lifetime Achievement Award(2002), the Canadian Education Association Whitworth

Award for educational research (1999), the KaplanResearch Achievement Award (2001), and a KillamScholar at the University of Alberta (2004).

Debbie Pushor is an associate professor in theDepartment of Curriculum Studies at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. In her program of research, she isengaged in narrative inquiries into “parent knowledge” and

into “parent engagement and leadership.” In her under- graduate and graduate teaching, she makes visible and cen-tral an often-absent or underrepresented conversation inteacher education about the positioning of parents in rela-tion to school landscapes.

Anne Murray Orr is an assistant professor in theSchool of Education at St. Francis Xavier University, NovaScotia, Canada. Her research program includes narrativeinquiries with classroom teachers to better understand howstudents, families, teachers, and administrators experiencelife in schools.


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