D.

Jean Clandinin
F. Michael Connelly

--- Narrative Inquiry

Experience and Story in

Qualitative Research

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data i

/
Clandinin. D. Jean. /1
Narrative inquiry : experience and story in qualitative G
research I D. lean ClandiniIl, F. Michael Connelly.-lst ed.
p. em. - (The Jossey-Bass education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7879-4343-6 (aik. paper)

1. Education-Research-Methodology. 2. Narration (Rhetoric).

3. Storytelling. I. Connelly, F. MichaeL II. Title. Ill. Series.
LB1028.C55 2000
370'.7'2-dc21
99-6680

FIRST EDrnON
HBPrinting 10 9 8 76 5 4 3 2
 What Do Narrative Inquirers Do? 49
CHAPTER FOUR
science was. He wanted to study scientific thinking as expressed in
what scientists actually did.

INTRODUCTION
What Do Narrative Likewise, in this chapter, and throughout the book, we wish to address
the topic of what narrative inquirers do. We do not deal with the huge
Inquirers Do? literature--some modern, much postmodern-that talks about nar­
rative. An example of what we are not doing is what Richardson does
in her chapter on narrative and sociology in a section entitled "What
Is Narrative?" (1995, p. 200), in which she defines narrative. Just as
Schwab made dear that he was not setting out to define science nor
even the methodology of science, we wish to make dear that we are
not setting out to define narrative.
We see our task as similar to Schwab's, as one of trying to provide
an answer to the question, What do narrative inquirers do? As with

B
Schwab, we are interested in inquiry terms and the spaces these terms
create for inquiry. We are interested in exploring how these terms de­
fine and bound narrative inquiries-how they bound the phenom­
---rin.--
ena, shape what passes for evidence, and determine what makes
defensible research texts.
efore we go on to explain what narrative inquirers We discuss the terms that we choose to use in our inquiries, which
do, we offer a parallel. It is always useful to establish a context of pur­ derive from the Deweyan view of experience (particularly situation,
pose. To do this, it is necessary to clarify what one is not going to do
continuity, and interaction). This leads into an examination of our re­
in order to clarify exactly what one is going to do. We use the work of search framework, the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space and
Joseph Schwab to illustrate this point.
the "directions" this framework allows our inquiries to travel-inward,
Schwab's artide entitled "What Do Scientists Do?" (1960) was part
outward, backward, forward, and situated within place. Finally, we
of an intense debate about scientific method. Schwab pointed out that demonstrate how our inquiry process is used with two CXaDlples from
much of the discussion about scientific method and the nature of sci­ our work.
ence was without reference to the doing of science but, rather, tended
to be built on considerations of scientific logic and the coherence of
scientific concepts. Analytic philosophy with its abstract emphases on NARRATIVE INQIDRY TERMS AND
language construction played a large role in the scientific method lit­ NARRATIVE INQUIRY SPACES
erature of the time. Schwab, by his title, signified his intention of en­ What are the terms for narrative inquiry? Readers familiar with the
tering the discussion by providing an account of what scientists narrative literature might imagine an array of terms derived from
actually did. In the article, Schwab specifically did not want to deal modern and postmodern writing and from literature studies. So nu­
with what people thought scientists should do, nor did he wish to offer merous are the terms that there is even a dictionary of narratology
metalevellogical or analytic and linguistic interpretations of what tlley (Prince, 1987). Our terms emerge not from this literature but from
did, nor even to expand philosophically derived notions of what our concern for experience and from our purpose-which is to think

48
 so NARRATIVE INQUIRY What Do Narrative Inquirers Do? 51

through the doing of narrative inquiry. As discussed in earlier chap­ In this earlier work, we included the dimension of place within the
ters, our terms for thinking about narrative inquiry are closely asso­ environment. We now believe it is preferable to see place as a third
ciated with Dewey's theory of experience, specifically with his notions tenn, which attends to the specific concrete physical and topological
of situation, continuity, and interaction. Our terms are not rigorous boundaries of inquiry landscapes.
extrapolations ofDeweyan theory. Indeed, a Dewey scholar might find
much to criticize. Dewey's work on experience is our imaginative
touchstone for reminding us that in our work, the answer to the ques­ A STORY OF WORKING IN A
tion, Why narrative? is, Because experience. Dewey provides a frame THREE-DIMENSIONAL NARRATIVE
for thinking of experience "beyond the black box;' that is, beyond the INQUIRY SPACE WITH MING FANG HE
notion of experience being irreducible so that one cannot peer into it.
With Dewey, one can say more, experientially, than "because of her Unbeknownst to either of them when Ming Fang He knocked on
experience" when answering why a person does what she does. Michael's door and asked if she c;:ould be a member of his research
With this sense of Dewey's foundational place in our thinking team, she was beginning a doctoral journey that would carry them both
about narrative inquiry, our terms are personal and social (interac­ back in time, her to her origins in precultural revolution times in
tion); past, present, and JUture (continuity); combined with the notion China and Michael to growing up in a rural cattle-ranching cornrnu­
of place (situation). This set of terms creates a metaphorical three­ nity in western Canada where Long Him ran Long Hirn's General Store
dimensional narrative inquiry space, with temporality along one di­ in the nearest two-store town. The ranching area had been settled pri­
mension, the personal and the social along a second dimension, and marily by British Isle immigrants, though by the time Michael attended
place along a third. Using this set of terms, any particular inquiry is the one-room country school, central Europeans were in evidence. Still,
defined by this three-dimensional space: studies have temporal di­ they all seemed and spoke like Michael and being a second-generation
mensions and address temporal matters; they focus on the personal Canadian, he grew up in what now appears to him to have been a
and the social in a balance appropriate to the inquiry; and they occur mostly homogeneous cultural cornrnunity. Long Him was, to Michael's
in specific places or sequences of places. 1990s adult recollection, the only person who did not fit easily into
Elsewhere (Clandinin and Connelly, 1994), we wrote about two of the cultural landscape. Long Him could speak enough English just to
these dimensions, following Dewey's notion of interaction, by focus­ conduct business. As a child, Michael accompanied his parents to town
ing on what we call four directions in any inquiry: inward and out­ for bimonthly, sometimes weekly, shopping trips, and though his par­
ward, backward and forward. By inward, we mean toward the internal ents patronized the other store (the owners being longtime friends),
conditions, such as feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dis­ they usually managed to visit Long Him's.
positions. By outward, we mean toward the existential conditions, that Thinking back, Michael knew almost nothing about Long Him,
is, the environment. By backward and forward, we refer to temporal­ and his guess is neither did his parents. Michael had no sense of Long
ity-past, present, and future. We wrote that to experience an experi­ Hirn's being integrated into community life. When a traveling preacher
eflce--that is, to do research into an experience-is to experience it started up a once-monthly Anglican church service, mostly everyone
simultaneously in these four ways and to ask questions pointing each attended, but not Long Him. Michael does remember what seemed to
way. Thus, when one is positioned on this two-dimensional space in him then to be an exotic story unfolding, as Long Him showed off a
any particular inquiry, one asks questions, collects field notes, derives Chinese bride one Saturday. The arrival of this mysterious bride, who
interpretations, and writes a research text that addresses both personal spoke no English, was explained by an equally mysterious «mail-order"
and social issues by looking inward and outward, and addresses tem­ process. She did not last through the first winter. Michael also recalls
poral issues by looking not only to the event but to its past and to its being fascinated by a chest-high water pipe that Long Him would
future. smoke, especially if asked to do so by Michael's parents to please the
52 NARRATIVE INQUIRY 53
What Do Narrative Inquirers Do?

children. Michael recalls the store, full of dark, secret hiding places as it. This literature is essentially based on the notion of cultural adap­
a marvelous place for a favorite childhood game of hide-and-seek.. tation through language acquisition. Her experience of Chinese and
Meeting Ming Fang and working through her thesis led Michael to Canadian culture, and her movements back and forth between them,
wonder where Long Him had come from. Moreover, his encounter led her to think that much more was at stake than language and cul­
with Ming Fang led Michael to wonder about himself, his family, and ture adaptation.
his community life and how his story of himself in relation to other It was out of this duster of experiences and considerations that she
cultures was shaped by family and community stories on the rural articulated her thesis proposal, which she ultimately conceptualiz.ed
landscape. Long Him was no doubt dropped off at Lundbreck, as the in her completed dissertation abstract as "a study of identity forma­
railroad was built with stations every four miles. Canada was knit into tion and cuLtural transformation of three Chinese women teachers as
a country by the railroad, a railroad built on the backs of labor they moved back and forth between Chinese an4 Canadian cultures"
brought from China. (He, 1998). The thesis is an intensive study of the lives of three Chi­
Michael has begun to puzzle, now that Ming Fang has finished her nese women, Shiao, Wei, and Ming Fang, tracing their lives from the
thesis, over who she and he are, relative to Long Him. Long Him was, late 1950s through a series of political and cultural upheavals in (,1llna,
as far as Michael can remember, his first multicultural experience. In their move to Canada, and the further upheavals they experienced in
his memory, there were no others until he attended a residential high living in Canada and in the study of higher education in Canada. Due
school, where members of the Peigan Indian reserve of the Blackfoot in part to ongoing political sensitivities in China, and in part to the
Nation attended. Ming Fang brought Michael back to these experi­ limitations ofbiography and autobiography, she created a method she
ences, and only now is he beginning to puzzle over his own attitudes, calls composite autobiography to narrate each woman's identity for­
sympathies, and outlooks toward people from other settings. Both mation and cultural transformation.
Ming Fang and Michael journeyed back to their childhood beginnings As Michael read and reread Ming Fang's, Shiao's, and Wei's stories
through her inquiry. Her completed dissertation on who she is helped of growing up in China, he came to understand something of how
Michael start to wonder who he is in a multicultural world. But she that time and place shaped their lives and the stories they tell of them.
too is faced with a new puzzle as Michael's stories of Long Him are The more Ming Fang worked to understand the relationship between
brought forward, and Ming Fang wonders about the place of Chinese her memories of her life and the landscape on which the lives of the
in Canada. three Chinese women were played out, the more Michael realized how
Ming Fang He is a mainland Chinese woman who went through limited his knowing of Long Him was, and how what little he did
the cultural revolution as a young girl, spent time on a reforming know was milled by the peculiar cultural qualities of his childhood
farm, received her bachelor's degree in China and her master's degrees landscape. In her dissertation, Ming Fang traveled back to a place
in English and in linguistics at two different universities in Canada. where her stories first unfolded. Though Michael too traveled back to
She took out landed Canadian immigrant status and as her disserta­ a place where his stories first unfolded, he realized there was no Chi­
tion work began was a citizen of two countries. She and her women nese place in his story of Long Him. Long Him was, in Michael's story,
friends with similar backgrounds were deeply puzzled and confused almost wholly constructed from Michael's experience of him as he ap­
over who they were. At the time her dissertation proposal took shape, peared on Michael's rural Canadian landscape. Michael had a distant
this confusion was expressed as one of experiencing a variety of cul­ observer's stereotypical sense of China, in which his childhood stories
ture shocks. She found community and Uj1iversity support networks of Long Him were embedded. Michael remembers two things in this
inadequate in helping her attain a strong sense of self. She partially regard. The first is his mother's admonition that they should clean off
supported herself by teaching English as a second language to immi­ their plates because, she would say, "Think of the starving children in
grants, many of whom were Chinese. She found little to clarify her China;' as if his eating were linked somehow to their starvation. The
sense of dislocation in this teaching and in the literature supporting second thing he remembers is the entrancing thought that if he could
54 NARRATIVE INQUIRY
What Do Narrative Inquirers Do? ss
dig down far enough, he would come out in China. He has no re­ questions, puzzles, fieldwork, and field texts of different kinds appro­
membered links of how these stories were connected in his mind to priate to different aspects of the inquiry. Thus, we might see Ming
Long Him's experiences of growing up in China. Fang collecting memory records of the cultural revolution through
Ming Fang's narrative inquiry carries Michael to the place of these conversations and interviews with her participants or, perhaps, re­
experiences. He is-through Ming Fang's thesis--a "world traveler" viewing posters, slogans, and news accounts of the era. As she focused
in Lugones's (1987) sense. It has taken a lifetime for him to even won­ on the personal, we might see how, perhaps through letters with her
der about becoming a world traveler to Long Him's world. Ming parents, she reconstructed a sense of how she felt about herself and
Fang's long-ago China stories and present-day Canadian ones help us, her family during the cultural revolution. This use of the terms is how
as Blaise (1993) suggests, "live in their countries, speak their language, we develop the remainder of this chapter.
negotiate their streets on their buses and turn our keys in their locks" What is unsaid, a third use of the terms (and not possible to say
(p.201). . with the stories so far presented), is the ambiguity, complexity, diffi­
culty, and uncertainties associated with the doing of the inquiry. These
doings, the "stuff" of narrative inquiry, can only be sensed and un­
THREE-DIMENSIONAL derstood from a reading of the full-blown inquiry. Though we do not
NARRATIVE INQUIRY SPACE explore this complexity here, we will come back to it in these and
We earlier created a metaphor of a three-dimensional space, in which other stories.
narrative inquirers would find themselves, using a set of terms that To return, then, to the second use, namely to the use of the terms
pointed them backward and forward, inward and outward, and lo­ to show how an inquiry is structured by the inquirer-that is, to See
cated them in place. We saw these dimensions as directions or av­ what the narrative inquirer does-we pick up on the temporal di­
enues to be pursued in a narrative inquiry. As we come to Ming mension. Ming Fang began, in her present time, with a feeling of cul­
Fang's and Michael's inquiries, we might think of these terms in sev­ ture shock. She described this feeling as personal, situated in the
eral different ways. present time, and located in her Canadian place. She looked backward
In terms of the grand narrative, we might imagine the terms as an in time to her feelings in China. She remembered a calm, intellectual
analytic frame for reducing the stories to a set of understandings. For childhood interrupted by the turmoil of the cultural revolution. As
instance, looking backward would be illustrated by Ming Fang's sto­ she engaged in this process, she remembered not only the personal
ries of the cultural revolution, and looking inward would be repre­ but also the intersection of the personal with the social. Her research
sented by her feelings of culture shock as she entered Canada and text, minimally described above, constitutes a dual personal and so­
began her dissertation studies. If we persisted in developing the terms cial narration. Throughout her narrative inquiry, she remains in her
as an analytic frame, we might go on to state findings developed for Canadian place while traveling back in time and place, in memory, to
each set. For example, at the intersection of place and time, we might a China that no longer exists. The three-dimensional space in which
claim that the China of Ming Fang's early life is a construction that her research is situated creates an ongoing sense of dislocation as she
now only exists in her remembered stories. At the intersection of look­ moves from a remembered past in one place to a present moment in
ing inward and p~ce, we might clairn that Ming Fang experienced cul­ another, all the while imaginatively constructing an identity for the
ture shock as she moved from one place, China, to another place, future.
Canada. At the intersection of looking outward and place, we might To return to Michael's remembered stories of childhood, he real­
claim that it was the difference between the two places that caused the izes that the terms also structure his (unexpected) narrative inquiry.
culture shock. He began in the present time with his work with Ming Fang. In telling
To turn the use of the terms more toward their experiential origins, stories of Ming Fang to Jean, he moved to recollecting memories from
we could think of them not so much as generating a list of under­ his childhood, then to memories of the first Chinese Canadian, Long
standings achieved by analyzing the stories, but rather as pointing to Him, he had ever met. In so doing, he moved backward in time and
56 NARRATIVE INQUIRY What Do Narrative Inquirers Do? 51

place, composing new stories for his present time and place. Thus, In the next story, we play again within a three-dimensional narra­
Michael composed yet untold stories of visiting Long Him's store. But tive inquiry space, but this time we locate the place within schools, as
he also recollected stories his mother had told him. Both kinds of sto­ we move temporally backward and forward. We work again with field
ries were lived in his childhood place and time. Both were told from texts of memory relationships and field texts of research transcripts.
his adult place and time, and in the bringing forward, both were
placed alongside his present-day story ofMing Fang and her long-ago
stories. A STORY OF WORKING IN A
In composing Michael's stories of another place and time, he was THREE-DIMENSIONAL NARRATIVE
called to consider how he felt. Here, he began an imaginative process INQUIRY SPACE WITH KAREN WHELAN
based on faint memories of an environment-a dark store, a water There are five people gathered at the table in the Centre on a cold,
pipe, a Chinese wife briefly seen. But as he located himselfwithin the crisp, sunshine-filled day in winter. It is Saturday and the light filters
three-dimensional inquiry space as we wrote this research text, in the window. The sky is an unbelievable blue but they hardly notice.
Michael began to awaken to how Long Him had "world traveled" to This is one of their research Saturdays. Chuck and Annie have driven
his place and to the significance of the fact that he had not "world up from Calgary to meet with Janice, Karen, and Jean to talk about
traveled" to Long Him's Chinese place and to Long Him's inner con­ and share their research. The tape recorder hums softly in the middle
ditions. Michael composed his relationship with Long Him from his of the table. They are intent on their conversation even though they
place on the rural western landscape, from his child's time, with his
have been sitting for several hours.
child's feelings, all milled and crafted by the landscape of childhood. They are part of an ongoing research group-teachers, principals,
As Michael composes this research text, he sees new possibilities as he and teacher educators-who are trying to understand their places on
restories his knowing of Long Him, Ming Fang, and himself in rela­ the professional knowledge landscapes on which they live. In what fol­
tion to them. Being in this space is complex for the narrative inquirer lows, Jean shares a fragment of the transcript made from that conver­
because all of these matters are under consideration all of the time. sation (as picked up by the tape recorder), in which Karen Whelan
In this story, we play within the three-dimensional narrative in­
speaks:
quiry space. Place shifts from Ming Fang's long-ago China to present­
day Toronto, from Michael's long-ago western Canadian place shared
with Long Him to Toronto. Time shifts from childhoods in western I think sometimes when you do tee! strongly about things though, that
Canada and China to present days in Toronto. Inner and existential marginalizes you. I can remember the first year with that principal. I
conditions for Michael as a child, for Ming Fang as a child, and for just got red fuced arguing with him over these report cards because he
both of them as adults are recounted. Long Him remains as partial wanted every kid to be evaluated the same way. Like we're going to say
memory, as partial imaginative construction, a figure in Michael's that, you know, a kid in your class is operating at a grade-one level,
puzzling over who Ming Fang and he are in this modern world broth and a kid is operating at a grade-three level in a grade-three classroom.
of cultures and ideas. He wonders what Ming Fang's written words We're going to evaluate them the same on the, we're going to, we're
of living in between, and either belonging nowhere or belonging going to check off for the kid operating at a grade-one level always fuil­
everywhere, might mean on the inside. He wonders at what Long ure, failure, failure because they are not working at grade level, so
Him made of his own life in the two-store ranching community they're always on the bottom, and I mean I can remember, I was in
town, and he wonders what his parents would think to hear their son, hysterics almost that he could even be thinking this way. How call you
a generation later, question the community's sensitivity to people of always mark a child as failing? And when I get upset about those
other cultures. He can only imagine they would be shocked and of­ things, I tend to get really passionate about them. Like I get tears in my
fended because, as he remembers them, they were so conscientiously eyes and I'm almost like incredulous, how can this be happening?
egalitarian. [group conversation, January 18,19971
58 NARRATIVE INQUIRY What Do Narrative lruquirers Do? S9

The conversation goes on, as they weave their talk across their own fifteen and just putting in time in that grade-four classroom, waiting
childhood memories, their student stories of remembered classrooms, to turn sixteen so they can legally drop out of school? These wonders
their teacher stories of remembered classrooms, their sharing of tran­ surmce for Jean as she writes about the remembered day.
scripts from ongoing research projects, one story calling up another Still later, as we write this research text, we think about inquiry
from one or another of them, from their pasts, from the data they had spaces. On that January day of the conversation, Karen took Jean and
collected. The tape recorder continues to record their talk, some of it the others in the research group backward in time as she told her story.
memory relationships and some of it sharing of research field texts, Karen described, from her vantage point of narrator, the conversation
such as school board documents and transcripts of research groups. with her principal. She described herself as red meed, as hysterical. She
The day ends, transcripts are made, and some months later Jean is felt passionate, she recalled, in the encounter. She described her talk
studying them. She studies them at her desk, reading and rereading with the principal, who wanted to have all students graded with ref­
them, stopping at this passage, for she is reminded of what she re­ erence to their grade level. She took the group back to that moment
members thinking that day. She searches the transcript for it, but there and pulled them forward into the future as she made the connection
is no record that she had spoken the word~. She stops reading and be­ between that moment and how she now sees herself as marginalized
gins to write. This is what she wrote: on the landscape where standardized testing and grading is now the
accepted story of school. She situated them in a place-a school in an
In the midst of a project meeting discussing transcripts of conversa­
urban center-where new policies on grading have come down the
tions with participants and field notes of school classroom meetings, a
conduit, relaying from policy to principal, to Karen, as teacher.
story of my own long-ago surfaces in my mind. I remember a class­
Jean was, at first, a listener but Karen's story evoked a memory for
room of my childhood: the smell of floor wax, gestetner fluid, and wet
her. She knows that she did not speak, for if she had, her words would
woolen mittens and scarves. I remember the sounds of desks scraping
have been captured in the transcribed conversation. It was only as she
on hard wood and her voice as she called out spelling words. The knot
read the transcripts that she remembered that Karen's story had
of anxiety clutches at my stomach, a feeling called forth by discussions
evoked a memory for her, which she had then written down. Jean re­
of children's experiences of being graded on report cards in standard­
called the long ago brought forward, first as a response to Karen's
ized ways. The smells, the sounds, the sights, the feelings create a pic­
telling and subsequently by Jean's reading of the transcript.
ture and a story comes quickly to mind.
Jean went backward to her long-ago classroom and forward to her
Jean is a child in the classroom, a classroom of the early 1950s in present-day research and to questions of what it means to be a narra­
an old brick school situated in the small town to which she is bused tive inquirer on the professional knowledge landscape. All of this takes
each day. Donnie and Daryl, two big boys, ride on her school bus. place within a place-her present-day place within a research univer­
They command respect on the school bus, and they always sit at the sity; where she does research and writes about her work with teachers,
back of the bus. But when they come into the school, they come to and her long-ago place, where she is a country child educated in a
Jean's grade-four classroom. And it is from within that classroom that small-town school.
she remembers the day of that spelling test. These are story fragments now stitched together in Jean's memory.
As Jean sits at her university professor's desk, reading the transcript, When she was a child in that long-ago classrooIIl, she was not a nar­
she remembers herself as a child in that school, a child taking a test. She rative inquirer. There was no intention to keep notes of those experi­
remembers a teacher standing tall in the center of the room, moving ences. She now re-creates the narrative through meIIlory relationships.
between the rows of desks. Is she marching? Do her high heels dick From a temporal and spatial and bodily distance, she tells a story from
on the floor? Does she stop at Jean's desk to observe her writing a the now: spinning a story of a teacher, of two boys, of a small girl, of
word? Does she pause at Daryl's desk? Is Daryl really a bad boy? Does a classroom. There are no field texts, no careful notes, no photographs,
Donnie take the test? Does Jean remember that Donnie and Daryl are no transcribed conversations of the events in that classroom.
60 NARRATIVE INQUIRY What Do Narrative Inquirers Do? 61

Our purpose in giving this example is to demonstrate the use of especially with respect to Michael, Ming Fang, and Long Him's story.
terms that structure our three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. Among the responses was one that suggested that Michael was racist
We began in the present with a segment of transcript from an inquiry in his portrayal of Long Him. The response seemed to suggest that
group meeting in which Karen describes a year-ago encounter with racism was apparent in the use of stereotypical language, such as water
her principal. Karen's words take Jean further back along the tempo­ pipe, mail-order bride, and exotic. In this response, our language was
ral dimension to her own childhood. But as we slide backward and taken as representative of our present-day tellers' point of view. We
forward temporally, it is clear that we stay rooted in a place called have reworked the text to strengthen the narrative links between then
school, a place where grading is practiced, and children's experiences and now.
are sorted according to those grades. We go inward to Karen's intense This response made US stop and wonder, for we had intentionally
feelings and outward to the conversation with her principal, who is chosen the language to represent, as memory would have it, the atti­
describing the mandated report cards and the grading system. Jean tudes at work in Michael's childhood landscape. As tellers of the story,
too goes inward to old feelings of anxiety produced by a spelling test We deliberately embedded what we realized were cultural stereotypes
and to stories of classmates who were visible evidence, to her child's­ and insensitive attitudes available in his childhood landscape. We are
eye view, of what happens when tests are failed. What starts to become now dearer in our thinking for having taken the response seriously.
apparent as we work within our three-dimensional space is that as Why do we portray Michael's childhood as we do? Partly, we use the
narrative inquirers we are not alone in this space. This space enfolds language we do to make it clear that these were our stories. We did live
us and those with whom we work. Narrative inquiry is a relational in­ out what we now call cultural stereotypes. This telling of ourselves,
quiryas we work in the field, move from field to field text, and from this meeting of ourselves in the past through inquiry, makes clear that
field text to research text. as inquirers we, too, are part of the parade. We have helped make the
world in which we find ourselves. We are not merely objective inquir­
ers, people on the high road, who study a world lesser in quality than
A REFLECTIVE NOTE
our moral temperament would have it, people who study a world we
As we worked within our three-dimensional spaces as narrative in­ did not help create. On the contrary, we are complidt in the world
quirers, what became clear to us was that as inquirers we meet our­ we study. Being in this world, we need to remake ourselves as well as
selves in the past, the present, and the future. What we mean by this offer up research understandings that could lead to a better world.
is that we tell remembered stories of ourselves from earlier times as We could have left Michael's story out or glossed over what seemed
well as more current stories. All of these stories offer possible plotlines less than proper in our current view of the world. We could have cre­
for our futures. ated a script that suggested Michael's first encounter with Chinese
Telling stories of ourselves in the past leads to the possibility of Canadians was with Ming Fang, a script that would have left him as a
retellings. We saw this in Michael's story in his relations with Ming wise present-day inquirer without a humbling narrative past. His place
Fang and Long Him. We saw it again in Jean's story with Karen and in this unnarrated script is present-day Toronto, a city the United Na­
Jean's grade-four classroom. It is not only the participants' stories that tions calls the world's most multicultural city, a place from which
are retold by a narrative inquirer. In our cases, it is also the inquirers' Michael could readily claim unparalleled insight on cultural matters.
(Michael's and Jean's) stories that are open for inquiry and retelling. But such a script removes Michael from the world, as if he were not
As narrative inquirers, we share our writing on a work-in-progress also part of the phenomenon, as if he were not a person with narra­
basis with response communities. By this, we mean that we ask oth­ tive blinders like any other.
ers to read our work and to respond in ways that help us see other What this response has highlighted for us is that as narrative
meanings that might lead to further retelling. We shared this chapter inquirers we work within the space not only with our participants
and received, among the responses, some that were surprising to us, but also with ourselves. Working in this space means that we become
62 NARRATIVE INQUIRY

visible with our own lived and told stories. Sometimes, this means that
CHAPTER FIVE
our own unnamed, perhaps secret, stories come to light as much as
do those of our participants. This confronting ofourselves in our nar­
rative past makes us vulnerable as inquirers because it makes secret
stories public. In narrative inquiry, it is impossible (or if not impos­
sible, then deliberately self-deceptive) as researcher to stay silent or to
present a kind of perfect, idealized, inquiring, moralizing self Being in the Field
Walking into the Midst of Stories

--=:;(~

s we worked within the three-dimensional narra­

tive inquiry space, we learned to see ourselves as always in the midst­
located somewhere along the dimensions of time, place, the personal,
and the social. But we see ourselves in the midst in another sense as
well; that is, we see ourselves as in the middle of a nested set of sto­
ries-ours and theirs.

INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we take a look at several researchers' experiences in the
midst. We examine the complexities they must negotiate. Specifically,
we explore key areas that researchers must learn to work through ill
their fieldwork-negotiating relationships, negotiating purposes, ne­
gotiating transitions, and negotiating ways to be useful.

BEGINNING IN THE MIDST

As researchers, we come to each new inquiry fidd Jiving our stories.
Our participants also enter the inquiry field in the midst ofliving their

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