Meanings and Motivation in Education Research

Margaret M. Baguley, Yvonne S. Findlay, Martin C. Kerby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317609735
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Meanings and Motivation in Education Research demonstrates the vibrant and vital connection between the researcher and their research. Research is often perceived as an entity which is seemingly produced in isolation; however, there are many important factors which are involved, and this book explores the complexities of investigating the specific areas of meaning and motivation for researchers working in the education sector.

With contributions from authors drawn from the field of education in various stages of their career, the perspectives shared in this book are from a diverse range of countries including Australia, Canada, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Key topics include:

• personal and professional identity
• narrative inquiry as method
• teacher educators as researchers
• conducting education research
• mixed methods in educational research

Foregrounding the personal experiences, interests and motivations of educational researchers Meanings and Motivation in Education Research proves important insights into current discussions in educational research including researchers' identities, the ways they conduct research and most importantly the impact institutional and personal politics have on their work. This will be a valuable text for educators, education researchers, policy-makers and practitioners across the globe.

PART I

Personal and professional identity

1

INTRODUCTION

Personal and professional identity

Margaret M. Baguley

An educational researcher’s identity can inform their chosen research areas and the approach they take in its exploration. The choice of research area is often personally meaningful for the researcher and can be motivated by a range of factors. The authors of the three chapters in this part of the book provide important accounts that reveal how their personal and professional identities inform one another in their research endeavours.

In the second chapter, Lee Schaefer, Sean Lessard, Saffron Panko and Nate Polsfut discuss the complexities of narrative inquiry, including its use in their research as method, phenomenon and pedagogy. They have used the story The Table Where Rich People Sit to illustrate how narrative inquiry can be used to create resonant stories using the three dimensional space of temporality, sociality and place. This approach can be used to inform and illuminate experiences that others may also find a connection with. The chapter provides an important overview of narrative inquiry, its philosophical underpinnings, and importantly, experiences from the authors that provide insights into their encounters with narrative inquiry in the education sector. The relational inquiry approach of narrative inquiry allows stories to be spoken, listened to, told and retold, and involves the participants as co-constructors with the researcher of their stories. The authors have provided an autobiographical narrative inquiry through this chapter that honours the life experiences of both themselves and their participants, and in the process reveals how this approach draws on their personal identity to inform the way they conduct research.

In Chapter 3, Viv Wilson explores the tensions experienced by teacher educators in the university sector, specifically in England. She explores the borderlands that teacher educators exist in between the world of the school and the university. Wilson proposes policy directions on teacher education have undermined research endeavours in favour of technical approaches with the implication of measurable outputs. The ramifications of this approach on teacher educator ­identity are explored using stories ‘from the field’ to connect to other research studies in this area. Finally, she argues that teacher educators need to emphasize the distinctive nature of their work and assert their professional identities as practitioners and researchers in order to successfully navigate this space.

Alison L. Black in Chapter 4 provides a personal account of her experiences as an academic trying to balance her family life with an academic career. This chapter draws upon Black’s extensive experience as an artist through the use of imagery and poetry to articulate the complex aspects of this hybrid identity and the difficulties in articulating this position. She uses personal experiences to highlight the pressures on female academics in the education sector and her desire to make sense of and thrive in this space.

2

THE TABLE WHERE RICH PEOPLE SIT

A turn toward narrative inquiry as method, phenomenon and pedagogy

Lee Schaefer, Sean Lessard, Saffron Panko and Nate Polsfut

Introduction

In their chapter ‘Locating narrative inquiry historically: Thematics in the turn to narrative’, Pinnegar and Daynes (2007) metaphorically speak to the philosophical implications of turning to narrative inquiry as an educational research methodology. This turn is not simply a shift from one way of framing a research question to another. Included within this turn are ontological and epistemological consequences that shape not only how we locate ourselves within our research, but also how we locate ourselves as teacher educators, and how we locate ourselves within the world. This chapter, drawing on Dewey’s notion of continuity and interaction as well as Clandinin and Connelly’s (1999) stories to live by, will inquire into the ontological shift involved with my (Lee’s) own turn to narrative inquiry as methodology, phenomenon and pedagogy. Within this inquiry the borderland spaces between narrative inquiry and other research paradigms (Clandinin & Rosiek 2007) will be illustrated through my own bumping with grand narratives surrounding ‘valid’ research. While this chapter will draw on the literature as well as my own experiences, it will also incorporate the experiences of two pre-service teachers who are in the midst of negotiating who they are and who they are becoming. In a collaborative way, we will draw attention to the resonant threads between the bumping of their stories around the grand narratives of teaching and the bumping of my stories with the grand narratives of research. By co-authoring this chapter it is our hope that we illustrate, experientially, practically and theoretically, how narrative inquiry informs educational research and educational pedagogy.

Beginning with stories

‘If you could see us here at our old, scratched-up, homemade table, you’d know that we aren’t rich, but my father is trying to tell us we are’ (Baylor 1994, p. 4). As Jean read the first few words of The Table Where Rich People Sit, I could not help but be intrigued by the profound illustrations in the book. Jean often began and ended each meeting of our graduate class on narrative inquiry with a story. Often times these stories were children’s books. Initially I felt uncomfortable. My experiences as a secondary teacher included little contact with children’s books. I questioned how a children’s book could possibly begin to teach me about the methodology of narrative inquiry. In other graduate courses we were discussing epistemological and ontological commitments of research methodologies. However, it was nearing the end of the semester and this routine of stories had become one of my favorite parts of the class. It was different here as the conversation opened with a book … with pictures and imagines. It was uncanny how these stories always seemed to bring our own experiences, the readings, and conversations together. While I may not have recognized it at the time, the space was working on me, slowly shifting my stories.

Some years later, Sean and I are now in Saskatchewan at the University of Regina alongside one another, teaching in the Faculty of Education. We are struck by how this children’s book, and experiences at the table, continue to resonate with us. We are thinking of The Table Where Rich People Sit and how the story has found its way into the classroom spaces we have co-composed alongside our students in the present at the University of Regina.

Unpacking our experiences

The Table Where Rich People Sit is a story by Byrd Baylor that speaks to the beauty of being together as a family surrounded by the richness of simple pleasures, pleasures that are at times difficult to measure or account for. The story opens with a young girl hosting a family meeting to speak to her parents about money and how they do not have enough of it. As she explains her concerns to her parents, they respond by sharing experiences of what counts for them and how the landscape and their family stories, connected to places, have a different sort of value. The sun … a moon shining in the night sky … desert vistas and the illumination of the stars are the moments captured through experiences that are difficult to measure; but they count to this family … they count to the parents within this story.

Baylor’s book, as we read it over once again and reflected on our past semester of teaching at the University of Regina, helps us ‘world travel’ (Lugones 1987) to earlier moments, to the first time we were introduced to the words within The Table Where Rich People Sit. It was at a place with a similar table but in a different setting, at the Centre for Research for Teacher Education at the University of Alberta, where the story, the words and the early beginnings of becoming narrative inquirers started to stay with us. We sat at the table together listening to the same story inquiring into our own experiences alongside The Table Where Rich People Sit. We were in the early process of learning to think with stories (Clandinin 2013) and beginning to understand what this might mean.

As we inquired into the philosophical implications of becoming involved with the research methodology of narrative inquiry, our conversations immediately turned back to our first experiences with thinking narratively. We knew very little about narrative inquiry when we entered the methodology class, referred to above and taught by Dr. Jean Clandinin. As part of this chapter we come back to our notes, dialogues and assignments from this particular course to begin to think about what Schön (1982) might call ‘a reflective turn’; a turn to narrative inquiry. Part of what we have come to see is that although we did not understand what narrative inquiry was, the methodology somehow resonated with our past experiences. In some ways the space created and honoured our past experiences, and validated how important our own experiences were to who we were and who we were becoming as both teacher educators and researchers. At the time we did not have the language to describe the importance of the metaphorical three dimensional narrative inquiry space that consists of temporality, sociality and place; however, we knew that our past experiences, relationships and places had shaped who we were and how we saw ourselves working alongside students. Today, as we read through our weekly writing dialogues, which were a required part of the class, we can see the connections that we could not quite see then. We can see more visibly how the space within the classroom shifted and how we have come to understand students, participants, research and our own personal experiences in relation.

It is not as though we have now reached a point where we have suddenly become narrative inquirers; we do not see ourselves in this static and concrete way. We see ourselves as in the midst (Greene 1995). We continue to come to understand who we are and who we are becoming by looking backwards and forward in time, as we are attentive to the sociality of these temporal experiences. Part of being a narrative inquirer, as we have learned, is being awake to a reflexive gaze that continuously disrupts what we think we know. As we remind ourselves to stay awake, we feel the desire to look back to our early experiences at the table in the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and to inquire into how our experiences with the particular book, The Table Where Rich People Sit, and other experiences in this relational place shaped our turn towards narrative inquiry. As we co-authored this chapter, we came to see that we are always in the making (Greene 1995), that we are perhaps always on the way, in terms of understanding who we are in relation to the methodology of narrative inquiry.

Theoretical frame

As we moved backwards to thinking about our first experiences with narrative inquiry, we came across a chapter that helped us inquire into our experiences of becoming narrative inquirers. Pinnegar and Daynes (2007) provide a historic glance at the field’s shift towards narrative inquiry as both phenomenon and methodology. Four turns towards narrative inquiry are discussed, highlighting the gradual shift in thinking about research as both relational and nested in experience. They define a turn as ‘a change in the direction from one way of thinking or being toward another’ (p. 7). From their words we get the sense that these turns do not represent binaries, but are conceptualized more as a continuum within which we all fall. While they list the turns in a numbered order, this does not necessarily mean they happen in this way or that each narrative inquirer would undertake all four turns. They define the four turns as (1) Relationship of researcher to researched; (2) From numbers to words as data; (3) From general to particular; and (4) Blurring knowing. An inquiry into the turns provides an opportunity to see how a turn to narrative inquiry can be quite different than a turn to another, perhaps more dominant, research method. In their chapter, we got the sense that Pinnegar and Daynes were tracing the shifts in the methodological field and identifying common threads of those who begin to take up narrative inquiry; however, in our chapter we take up their four turns and use them to help inquire into our own shifts, turns, toward narrative inquiry. We position ourselves in this study alongside two former students – Nate and Saffron – as co-authors, and alongside each other, as we continue to think about who we are as narrative inquirers, who we are becoming.

The scope of this chapter is not to create a prescriptive framework that prescribes the top ten things you might do in a narrative inquiry class, although some might find this helpful. This chapter is a temporal glance at our experiences with turning to narrative inquiry (Pinnegar & Daynes 2007) and provides context into not only the philosophical underpinnings of narrative inquiry, but also how our experiences with narrative inquiry bump with dominant research paradigms. These underpinnings and bumping places create forward looking stories around how we see our educational research and how our research shapes our pedagogies. It is through the dialogue and the co-creation of this chapter that we begin to further understand our experiences with narrative inquiry as methodology, phenomenon and pedagogy.

What is narrative inquiry?

Clandinin and Connelly’s notions of narrative inquiry inform the method undertaken in this chapter. It should be mentioned that the umbrella of narrative research is very broad and quite diverse. While it may be said that those engaged in narrative research methodologies see stories as important and as forms of data, the way these stories and data are taken up can be quite different depending on the particular method being undertaken. In this chapter we are drawing specifically on Clandinin and Connelly’s notions of narrative inquiry (2000) based partly on Dewey’s notions of experience (1938) being continuous and interactive. Those engaged in Clandinin and Connelly’s conception see narrative inquiry as both the method of study and the phenomenon under study.

Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as a methodology entails a view of phenomenon. To use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a particular view of experience as phenomenon under study.

Connelly & Clandinin 2006, p. 375

From our experiences with individuals not well versed in narrative inquiry as a methodology, we often hear misconceptions about what narrative inquiry is and what narrative inquirers do. An example would be a colleague who deems ­narrative inquiry as simply listening to stories and sharing them; akin to journalism. Some narrative inquiries begin with the telling of stories, which ‘often opens up the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Meanings and motivation in education research
• PART I Personal and professional identity
• PART II Conducting education research
• PART III Imposed imperatives
• Respondent’s text: stepping off the pedestal
• Index