The Relational Ethics of Narrative Inquiry

D. Jean Clandinin, Vera Caine, Sean Lessard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138285705
• eBook ISBN: 9781351977104
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Narrative inquiry is based on the proposition that experience is the stories lived and told by individuals as they are embedded within cultural, social, institutional, familial, political, and linguistic narratives. It represents the phenomenon of experience but also constitutes a methodology for its study. At the heart of this methodology is relational ethics. However, until now the functioning of this key relationship in practice has remained largely undefined. In this book the authors take on the essential task of developing a conceptual framework for the application of relational ethics to narrative inquiry.

Building on a corpus of more generalized research, this book is grounded in a multi-year study with indigenous youth and families. The authors describe their experiences of narrative inquiry, highlighting how relational ethics informed their negotiation of these research relationships. They also engage in a conversation with the work of philosophers who have guided their narrative inquiry to offer a more thorough understanding of relational ethics. Through this, and contributions from five further studies on a diverse range of subjects, a number of key points for successful relational ethics are isolated and expounded upon.

This book is an invaluable tool for researchers and postgraduates engaged in qualitative research — providing clear and practical guidance on ethical concerns. It also extends the work of the authors' two previous titles, Engaging in Narrative Inquiry and Engaging in Narrative Inquiries with Children and Youth.

1

LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD TO RELATIONAL ETHICS IN NARRATIVE INQUIRY

Relational ethics live at the heart of narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000); they direct us to see ethical action as situated within, and central to, relationships with participants.

Ethical matters need to be narrated over the entire narrative inquiry process. They are not dealt with once and for all, as might seem to happen, when ethical review forms are filled out and university approval is sought for our inquiries. Ethical matters shift and change as we move through an inquiry. They are never far from the heart of our inquiries no matter where we are in the inquiry process.

(Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 170)

For many years we drew on the words of Robert Coles (1989) and Barry Lopez (1990) to convey a sense of what we meant by relational ethics as living at the heart of narrative inquiry. Lopez writes,

The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.

(p. 60)

Lopez’s words highlight the ways that stories sustain people as they compose their lives. Stories are what keep each of us alive, able to go on with making a life in ways that are meaningful. He draws attention to the importance of taking care, of being careful with, and about, the stories we listen to and the stories we tell. Lopez’s words seem especially important to narrative inquirers in that, as researchers, we need to understand the ways that stories function in people’s day-to-day living, that is, stories can care for the teller of stories and can also care for those who listen to the stories told. Likening stories to being as essential to living as food gives us a strong sense of just how important stories are in sustaining lives.

Coles has also been helpful to us, particularly in his attention to the ways that stories express who each of us are as people. As a consequence to the links between who we are and the stories we tell calls us to attend carefully in relationally ethical ways.

We have to pay the closest attention to what we say. What patients say tells us what to think about what hurts them; and what we say tells us what is happening to us – what we are thinking, and what may be wrong with us. […] Their story, yours, mine – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

(Coles, 1989, p. 30)

Initially, Coles shows that we can learn about what is happening to a person by listening to a story; we can learn what is hurting them, what is happening to them. Coles also draws attention to the importance of the relationality between story listeners and storytellers, acknowledging that as someone tells a story, the story listener’s response tells of who they are and of how their stories are shaping us as we listen to them. For Coles, as for Lopez, stories are always with us, always part of who we are and are becoming. For both of them, respect for the stories lived and told is respect for each person’s living, for their life.

We often use the words of Coles and Lopez when we speak of engaging in narrative inquiry for it helps us and others to understand what it means to come alongside and listen to people’s stories, reminding us that narrative inquiry is, at its heart, an ethical undertaking. It matters if, and how, we tell our stories and listen to others’ stories in narrative inquiry. If, and how, we listen can influence, can shape, the lives of both listeners and tellers.

The idea of relational ethics has long lived in our actions, in the stories that we tell about who we are as narrative inquirers. The idea of relational ethics did not begin with a clearly thought out definition. Its first glimmers emerged as we engaged in autobiographical narrative inquiries into our experiences lived out long ago in our youth and childhoods, those stories from our early landscapes, stories that we call forward and inquire into in this chapter. As we engaged in various research projects, some of them in which all three of us engaged, the ideas of relational ethics began to take shape in the living with participants and each other and in our readings of other scholars and researchers. We first turn to representations of our autobiographical narrative inquiries and to how the ideas of a relational ethics began in nascent form.

Vera: Coming to Relational Ethics through Encounters

Thinking about coming to relational ethics always asks me to turn to my early childhood experiences.

It was the first or second week of Grade 5 and I was just beginning to understand the new routines of getting on the bus and of what it meant to go to a school in a different place. Children in Germany attend the Grundschule [Primary School] until they are around ten years of age or in the fourth grade. As part of Grade 4, teachers evaluate the academic achievement and potential of children and decide what secondary school is the best fit for them. Students at the secondary level are separated into different schools depending on academic achievement and interests. Some schools are focused on vocational schooling and end for students after the completion of Grade 10; other schools prepare students to attend University and go up to Grade 13. The end of Grade 4 is one of the most significant points of transition for young children in relation to schooling. For children in rural communities the transition is also most often marked by needing to reach larger urban centers that would provide access to schooling that prepared students for University. Most often school buses would be used to transport students.

I remember sitting on the bus, a bus that always took us straight through town, when I saw Peter on his bicycle. That morning I saw him pedaling hard as he followed the bus, trying to catch up to us. While I knew that they had dispersed us at the end of Grade 4, I did not know just how deeply it would shape the rest of my life. Sitting quietly on the bus, I not only watched Peter, but also listened carefully to the voices around me … children in older grades not only laughed at Peter’s concerted efforts to catch up to us on his bicycle, but also made other comments. The comments focused on his intellectual abilities, and names like Dummkopf (which could be translated along the lines of “fool” or “idiot”) still echo in my ears even now. I knew Peter as Peter, my friend. As Peter was unable to catch up to the bus and as his body turned into a shadow and then disappeared as the bus picked up more speed, the conversations diminished and I continued to stare out the window. Similar scenes would repeat themselves for the next few weeks in different ways. Names would be dropped of children, some of whom I knew, while others were unfamiliar to me – each time their names were linked to words like Dummkopf, Esel (jackass), Schwachkopf (half-wit or dim-wit), Trottle (idiot) or similar names. The names seem to come easily and the words like Dummkopf or Schwachkopf rolled off other children’s tongues, as if these were ordinary words, which required neither explanation nor justification.

Over many years now I have often thought about Peter and that day he followed the bus on his bicycle. Each time there is a sense of sadness that is called forth for me about a friendship that was difficult to sustain in a system that organizes children based on their perceived abilities; there too is a sense of loss that still lingers. As Peter’s body and bicycle faded from my view on the bus, so did our friendship over time. Yet what has been sustained has been the memory of him and a sense of our friendship that was present in my early childhood. Over time this sense of friendship has called me to think about social and ethical responsibilities and what I mean by this as I think with relational ethics. Who was I and who am I in relation to Peter’s experiences? And who am I in relation to the children that used words that were hurtful and marked people as less than with such ease. I did not disrupt their story about Peter as a child. As a child, I did not disrupt the larger social, cultural, or institutional stories of schools, that shaped the unfolding lives of children, families, and friendships intentionally or purposefully; I did not disrupt the story of profound inequity. Remembering Peter as we write this book calls me to think about relational ethics from a place of responsibility and friendship.

With Peter, my sense of friendship is connected to a love that is sustained despite a physical separation, despite an inability to touch and stay close to Peter’s body over time. Yet, his physical absence did not break this sense of friendship that I continue to hold for him. Remembering Peter has been significant as I have come to name relational ethics as important in the work that I do now. It is in the moments of encounter, an encounter that was particularly difficult for me as a child, that I was called to recognize who I am and am becoming. That day sitting on the bus, watching Peter, I turned to silence and was unsettled by the cruelty of others. This silence, much later in my life, pushed me to recognize that I not only shape these encounters, but that they in turn shape me. It is my silence that came to unsettle me over time.

While I did not name these encounters as moments in which I learned about relational ethics, I did know that these encounters would continue to resonate in my life. My silence then continues to be present in my life now – not in the same way, but in ways that profoundly shape my sense of responsibility. This way of thinking with experience has been reinforced over time through my own family stories – family stories that were very much shaped by a history of war for my grandparents and parents, and that called forth a sense of social and political responsibility for them in the post-war period. As I watch my extended family, I learned that this sense of responsibility shapes their ordinary and everyday experiences; it shapes the ways they live their lives and the ways they see their lives unfolding. In thinking with relational ethics, there is a sense of living with responsibilities and friendships that carries across times, that shapes who we are and are becoming. Relational ethics in this way is future-oriented, as much as it is lived in the present. Peter’s disappearing shadow reappears in ways that draw me into my thinking about responsibilities and friendships in connection to relational ethics.

JEAN: Coming to Relational Ethics through Family Stories

“It’s coming up soon, Mom. Can we go to town to buy some fabric to make me a new dress for school? I can’t start school again this fall in my old clothes. I need something new to wear. It’s a new grade. There will be new kids. What if they don’t remember me? What if they don’t like me?” My voice became shriller, my tears more quickly springing to my eyes as the days passed and the end of August approached. “Please mom.” Late August, September, Labour Day on the horizon, the threat and promise of a new school year starting was marked in similar ways each year. Some of my earliest memories involved moves from my farm home to school building: the shift from one world to another.

Each June end, each September Labour Day, marked the times and places when my worlds shifted. When school ended in June, I ran down the quarter-mile-long rutted road from the school bus stop where my siblings and I stepped off the bus to our house. I threw my report card on the kitchen table calling out “I passed with honors” to my mother. My dress was discarded on the bed as I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt. There was no need for “school clothes” now that school was done for the year. June 30, a dividing day, an ending, a beginning.

At home, summers were marked by days of working in the garden, at first hoeing and weeding in the massive gardens that held the promise of food for the long prairie winters, followed by days of picking, canning, and preserving. My world in the summer was a world lived in relation with siblings, family, and hard work, with time for swimming in the reedy lake, reading, climbing trees, picking berries, gathering eggs, driving tractors, milking cows, separating cream from milk, helping out with what needed doing.

I knew early in life that what mattered was our family. I knew early that our family was part of a larger family. I knew early that our family was part of a community. I knew I was part of a much larger set of relations. I knew these nested sets of relationships were what mattered, who I was and how I lived within those relationships mattered. While this knowing was present all year, the feelings were always more pronounced in the summers.

And then as August days passed, the familiar feelings of ending and beginning came again. And my pleading and tears began until my mother relented, fabric was purchased, and new clothes were sewn. New clothes made it possible for me to imagine myself leaving my familial and community world and reentering my school world. I learned early that I was good at school: I learned to read, print neatly, write, follow instructions that detailed how workbooks and pages were to be completed, how to add and subtract, how to follow directions and fit into the school. I learned to do what I was told, even when it did not always make sense to me. I was good at “doing school.” I learned to write tests and answer questions, to get grades that were always noted as excellent. And each day at 3:30 I got on the school bus, was reunited with siblings, and left one world and returned to another world. The end of the day was also a dividing point between the home and school worlds. The school world leaked a bit into the home world with homework and school assignments, work my family made space for in my familial world as my mother made sure I had time to do my homework alongside chores and other home responsibilities.

These long-ago moments of my experiences, lived in two such different worlds, bubbled up as I sat and wrote of my work as a narrative inquirer alongside children, youth, and their families. There were no places in my early years to make sense of the worlds in which I lived: that in-school world (Lugones, 1987) and those worlds outside of school, worlds that I inhabited, worlds in which I was both at ease and not at ease. These worlds were composed of what I now understand as worlds in which different understandings of ethics played out: ethical relationships shaped by considerations of rights and fair play and ethical relationships shaped by attending to lives in the making, to who I was, in relation to others with whom I lived.

As a child and youth, I did not consider my experiences in these different worlds in ethical terms. I knew, however, that these were different worlds, shaped in different ways that allowed me to live and tell different stories. In the school curriculum making world I knew the rules to live by, rules and codes built around what were agreed upon “good” values that demonstrated respect for moral principles that included honesty, fairness, equality, dignity, diversity, and individual rights. It was not that the ideas of honesty, fairness, equality, dignity, diversity, and individual rights were not important in my home. But in my home curriculum making world I knew different ways to live, ways to live that did not work from moral principles but from living in ways that attended to the life-composing of each person in the community, to the importance of world making in which everyone played a part in shaping their own and others’ stories to live by.

Understanding the ways worlds are shaped by ethics was not something I was awake to as I was growing up, at least not in a conscious way. In fact, I do not remember much talk at all, either at home or in school, about ethical matters. In schools teachers talked about honesty and fairness a great deal, particularly when someone was “in trouble” or when there were classroom “problems,” but they were not named as ethics. The talk at home was about how to treat others, about responsibilities to those in my family, those in the farming community, and those who came into the community as visitors or new residents. In both worlds it was through the actions of others more than through the words that were spoken that I learned about ethical relations, about what was right and about how people came to know right and wrong. At school it was wrong to cheat or steal, there were moral codes of conduct built on honesty and it did not matter the consequences or life circumstances of those who were seen to be cheating or stealing. Some things were wrong. At home there were also moral codes of conduct that shaped how my family lived but they were situated in the relations between people, in attending to each life in the making. I knew through my family’s actions that when people did not have food my family needed to share; that when animals were on roads and in danger from being hit by traffic my family needed to move them to safety; that when someone needed help, for whatever reason, my family needed to help. I knew, too, that when my family needed help that others in the community would be there. There was no talk of ethics although there was talk of what was right and how I and others in my family knew what was right in the different worlds.

Sean: Coming to Relational Ethics Situated within Place

In my master’s work I revisited some of my early childhood stories. Part of what follows is taken from my master’s thesis.

On the farm my dad would often take walks on his land, sifting through the soil, carefully analyzing the future of his crops. In the fields he often found artifacts from the Cree people who once inhabited the land. I remember the two hammer stones (mauls) he uncovered. He showed me how they were used as tools to grind meat and grains. One of the stones was grey and the other brown. I could see how, through time and use, distinct markings and grooves were formed in the rocks. Eventually, the storied tools found their place on a shelf in his closet. I never gave much thought to the two stones that occupied that place. Their true meanings evolved as I grew older. Many years later when I would come home from university, I often had vibrant discussions with my dad about the stories of the past and the history of First Nations Peoples. I was always excited to share the stories that I was learning about myself and my people. I remember many great conversations and talking at length about the treaty process and residential schools; he always had questions for me and I did my best to answer them.

A specific weekend trip home stays with me in my mind. I was getting ready to leave and go back to the city for school. I put my jacket on and opened the closet door; on the shelf were the two stone tools. They were moved to a place that was clearly visible. My dad reached up on the shelf and gathered the stones in his hands, telling me to take care of them. Like many of our conversations the message was simple and powerful. Throughout my travels the only possessions that I have retained from the farm are the two stones. I realize how important they are. They represent my worlds and the shared paths that often intersect in my developing story.

My dad was not an educated man in a formal school sense. He finished school in Grade 6 to start work on the farm. This is the way it was; there was not an option...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Looking Backward and Forward to Relational Ethics in Narrative Inquiry
• 2 The Relational Ontology of Narrative Inquiry Shapes Relational Ethics
• 3 The Living and Telling of Narrative Inquiry in the Arts Club
• 4 Nurturing [Wilder] Gardens, Love, and Narratives Anew
• 5 The Relational Ethics of Attending with Wide-Awakeness to the Ongoingness of Experience
• 6 Making Masala: Shaping a Multiperspectival Narrative Inquiry through a Re-search of and for Storied Images
• 7 The Relational Ethics of Moving Slowly in Ways That Allow for Listening and Living
• 8 Embracing Tensions through Narrative Inquiry into Experiences of People Who Are Homeless in Japan
• 9 The Relational Ethics of Engaging with Imagination, Improvisation, Playfulness, and World-Traveling
• 10 Dwelling (Together) in the Depths of (Un/Not) Knowing
• 11 The Relational Ethics of Always Engaging with a Sense of Uncertainty and Not Knowing
• 12 All My Relations
• 13 Relational Ethics as Lived Embodiments that Require Us to be Still and Attend to, and with, Silence and Contemplation
• 14 Ways of Departure: Contemplating Relational Ethics in Narrative Inquiry
• 15 Living Relational Ethics
• Afterword: The Ethics and Politics of Narrative Inquiry
• References