Developing Narrative Theory

Life Histories and Personal Representation

Ivor F. Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136731013
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación de adultos

We live in an age of narrative: life stories are a crucial ingredient in what makes us human and, in turn, what kind of human they make us. In recent years, narrative analysis has grown and is used across many areas of research. Interest in this rapidly developing approach now requires the firm theoretical underpinning that would allow researchers to both approach such research in a reliably structured way, and to interpret the results more effectively.

Developing Narrative Theory looks at the contemporary need to study life narratives, considers the emergence and salience of life narratives in contemporary culture, and discusses different forms of narrativity. It shows in detail how life story interviews are conducted, and demonstrates how the process often begins with relatively unstructured life story collection but moves to a more collaborative exchange, where sociological themes and historical patterns are scrutinised and mutually explored.

At the core of this book, the author shows that, far from there being a singular form of narrative or an infinite range of unique and idiosyncratic narratives, there are in fact clusters of narrativity and particular types of narrative style. These can be grouped into four main areas:

• Focussed Elaborators;
• Scripted Describers;
• Armchair Elaborators; and
• Focussed Describers.

Drawing on data from several large-scale studies from countries across the world, Professor Goodson details how theories of narrativity and life story analysis can combine to inform learning potential.

Timely and innovative, this book will be of use to all of those employing narrative and life history methods in their research. It will also be of interest to those working in lifelong learning and with professional and self development practices.

Part 1

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Studying Life Narratives

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Chapter 1

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Introduction: Studying life stories and life histories

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Since very early on in my life I have been fascinated by the way people construct and present accounts of their lives. Such life stories fleshed out with anecdotes, jokes and family photos, and often told within family gatherings, were a central part of my upbringing. The fascination was no doubt increased by growing up in a very oral culture, a working-class family with extended community roots.

Mine was a family where the telling of stories was part of our daily living together. It was the main communicative device and a source of enduring pleasure in our family interactions. In a real sense our understanding of the world was constructed and mediated through the stories we shared with each other. Mine was not a world where books featured very centrally. My grandparents could not read or write, and my father, a gas fitter, read using the ‘wheelbarrow method’ he advocated to all and sundry. Since there were many words he could not read (he left school at 13), he maintained he could get the sense of the meaning by just saying ‘wheelbarrow’ each time he encountered a word he didn’t know. The wheelbarrow method was pioneered by another non-reader he sat next to at school. This boy was famous for telling the headmaster that when he grew up he wanted to be a ‘gobbing gardener’. In fact he ended up as one, so the wheelbarrow method also worked for him in the end.

As soon as I learnt to read, at the age of eight, I began to realize that even the literate were highly dependent on stories. Far from being a disadvantage, in some ways my early and rather specialized introduction to the world through stories proved to be enormously helpful. As Christopher Booker’s wonderful book details, stories are ubiquitous:

At any given moment all over the world hundreds of millions of people will be engaged in what is one of the most familiar of all forms of human activity. In one way or another they will have their attention focussed on mental images which we call a story.

We spend a phenomenal amount of our lives following stories: telling them; listening to them; reading them; watching them being acted out on the television screen or in films or on the stage. They are far and away the most important feature of our every day existence.

(Booker 2004: 2)

I believe Booker is entirely correct when he asserts that stories ‘are far and away the most important feature of our everyday existence’. For this reason, it has always struck me as surprising, if not downright contrary, that so many of our educational endeavours, whether teaching or learning, pay so little attention to stories. Why are educators so parsimonious in employing the most important feature of our everyday existence? Is there a reason linked to the reproduction of the social order? Are stories too egalitarian, too inclusive, for an educational system that seeks to select and foster certain groups but not others?

In the past three years in the books Narrative Learning (Goodson et al. 2010) and Narrative Pedagogy (Goodson and Gill 2011), a group of colleagues and I have explored the potential of stories, and the narrative techniques underpinning our storied existence, in particular their relationship to different social contexts and varying social purposes.

In a sense, maybe coming to understand the complex juxtaposition of storying and literacy was part of my journey out from my culture, whilst still holding on to its essence. Unlike some scholarship boys, I never at any time had any desire to leave my working-class culture behind. I wanted to travel with it. I was ‘coming from the margins’ but had no great desire to arrive. A major reason was my enduring fascination with storytelling and my increasing curiosity about people’s life stories. An abiding question was: what role do stories play in our life work – in our formulating of plans, dreams, plots, missions, purposes? In short, how efficacious is storying in meaning-making? What ways of knowing are involved in storying? How are ‘life stories’ implicated in identity, agency and learning?

But, as in life, it is one thing to have a set of questions; it is quite another to have the opportunity to explore them. Our social position also influences our dispositions and capacities. So I have been profoundly fortunate to have the research opportunities to explore my enduring questions about the meaning and status of life stories. Since 1975, I have been involved in a range of university research projects. But I suppose the writing of this book, in one specific sense, echoes a drive to stay close to ordinary working-life culture and not become entirely detached within university academia. It is an attempt to move between my university research into a more broadly conceived and represented set of ideas and to present these ideas in a book form that is not too formally academic, yet is rigorous in its use of evidence and arguments.

A lot of my initial research has been involved with the public sector – the teachers and nurses who provide so much support to our social fabric and social purpose. Investigating their life stories and showing how personal visions and missions mesh with our professional commitments, or clash with those who would restructure their work and missions, has been a research concern of the past three decades. The result has been a series of books in this area: Teachers Lives and Careers (Goodson and Ball 1985), Biography, Identity and Schooling (Goodson and Walker 1991), Studying Teachers’ Lives (Goodson 1992), Teachers’ Professional Lives (Goodson and Hargreaves 1996), Investigating the Teacher’s Life and Work (Goodson 2008), Professional Knowledge and Educational Restructuring in Europe (Goodson and Lindblad 2010).

A lot of my early work was conducted in England and Europe, but in 1986 I went to work in Canada. At that time the country had a strong commitment to the public sector and to public services, whereas Britain seemed intent on dismantling important sections of its social provision. At the same time in Britain, research on social provision and social distribution in the public services was discouraged. The same pattern as that in the early 1980s seems to be reassembling itself under the current British coalition. Perhaps it is not surprising that governments intent on attacking and dismantling the public sector discourage research on its effects.

In the early 1990s, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada adopted a much broader vision of how research could aid our understanding of public affairs. In my case, I was offered funding for a project on the life and work of racial minority immigrant teachers in the country. The work adopted the life history approach, which developed as a means of investigating and illuminating the main issues. Our studies collected a series of life histories and life stories of teachers who were immigrants to Canada and part of racial and ethno-cultural minorities. This was a study which helped me to understand the cultural context of life story work. It is extremely important that life histories focus not just on the narrative of action but also on the historical background, or what I have called ‘the genealogy of context’. One of the most detailed studies of narrativity was that of an immigrant from Central America who narrated his story; both as a story of cultural migration and as one of a scholarship boy.

The ‘scholarship boy’ story (and, of course, there are ‘scholarship girl’ stories too) is a particular example of a relationship between social structure and story, and how social structures at particular historical times provide available scripts or scripted resources from which people can construct their life stories. The scholarship boy story is a particular example of this juxtaposition of a particular historical moment of opportunity for a selective group of students – sometimes of working-class or minority cultural origin. The storyline then privileges some whilst, of course, silencing others for as long as it is employed. The scholarship boy story was commonly employed in different parts of the world in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was in that sense a socially scripted and sanctioned way to tell a life story, but it also served to underwrite and support a particular moment in history and a particular vision of social opportunity and social structure, and one which at that time distinctly privileged male over female stories. Only recently and retrospectively have scholarship girl stories been given a fair place (for example, Lorna Sage’s wonderful Bad Blood 2001). To understand such a life story genre properly it has to be read against the backdrop of the historical context which privileges certain storylines. To do that is to move from life story collection to life history construction, whereby the historical context is interrogated and elaborated.

The collection of stories that merely embellish or elaborate mainstream stories, such as that of scholarship boys, essentially stay close to a prior script and in that sense merely fortify patterns of domination. To avoid this in our pursuit of narrativity and to understand it we shall need to move from life stories to life histories, from narratives of action to genealogies of context – in short, towards a way of studying that ‘embraces stories of action within theories of context’. If we do this, stories can be ‘located’, which means they can be seen as the social constructions they are, located in time and space, social history and social geography. Our stories and storylines need to be understood, not just as personal constructions but as expressions of particular historical and cultural opportunities. Life story work concentrates, then, on personal stories, but life histories try to understand stories alongside their historical and cultural backgrounds.

Only if we deal with life stories as the starting point for our understanding, and as the beginning of a process of coming to know, will we begin to understand their meaning. If we use them as starting points we come to see them as social constructions which allow us to locate them in historical time and social space. In this way the life story that is told individualizes and personalizes. But beyond the life story, in the life history, the intention is to understand the pattern of social relations, interactions and historical constructions in which the lives of women and men are embedded. The life history then asks whether private issues are also public matters. It sets our understanding of our life stories within an understanding of the times in which we live and the opportunity structures which allow us to story ourselves in particular ways at particular times.

This broadening of the scope of the Canadian project began to move the focus of my work beyond schooling into other social and cultural locations, and this helped to provide some degree of understanding of how narrativity and personal elaboration change according to particular historical periods and particular cultural locations.

Some of the later work focussed on North America as I was working in Canadian and American universities. In 1998, a considerable grant from the Spencer Foundation allowed a valued team of colleagues and I to use life history methods to explore the histories and practices of the educational endeavour in Canadian and American schools. The studies which emerged in the book Professional Knowledge, Professional Lives (Goodson 2003) explored the clash between personal stories and dreams and how these resonated with, or related to, the move towards targets and tests then underway. In American schools they illustrate the profound insensitivity with which new attempts to restructure education dealt with the hopes and dreams of frontline professionals. This clash seems to be heightened amongst the most creative professionals – those who we might assume are in most articulate touch with their own life stories, hopes and dreams.

What then began to emerge in this large research project, involving 18 researchers and a range of schools in two countries, was a pattern of differentiation in the articulation and significance of life stories. Some professionals were clearly very in touch with their own life story and personal vision – it was a matter of intense concern to them and there was a large commitment to the defining and elaboration of their story. These groups seem to find the prescriptive nature of targets and tests highly disruptive and subversive to their sense of purpose. We documented many prize-winning teachers (in America, top teachers often attract a stream of awards) who found the collision between their own story and vision and a micromanaged externally prescribed story and vision traumatic. On the other hand, another group of professionals, especially some of the newer teachers, often accepted external prescription of the story and vision more easily, saying: ‘I’m happy to work to the script,’ adding ‘it’s only a job after all.’

This differentiation in the meaning and significance of life stories for professional people began to settle into a new set of questions about life stories. Why do some people spend so much time in interior thought and self-conversation about their life story whilst others seem far less concerned and are willing to accept an externally generated script? Do these different kinds of narrativity crucially affect our identity and agency? Do people’s creativity and learning styles respond to these differences? Are there certain historical periods which favour certain kinds of narrativity over others? Were, for example, the 1960s considered special partly because they provided such opportunity for more personalized narrativity, whilst the current period sometimes favours the externally driven prescription of scripts, whether as niche-defined consumers or heavily scrutinized citizens? In short, is narrativity a crucial variable between external structure and personal agency? In understanding narrativity, might we be getting at aspects of a kind of ‘DNA of personal response?’ To put it in sociological terms, are we looking at a crucial ‘mediating membrane’ or a ‘point of refraction’ between external structure and personal agency?

These, then, were some of the questions emerging in the early millennial years as the research studies on professional life stories came to a close. But every pursuit of research questions, especially in the increasingly politicized base of university research, is a victim of serendipity and chance. Here, fortune favoured the pursuit of the questions itemized above. By now, my personal journey had brought me back from America to my much-loved home country with a sense of relief deeply shared by my wife and son. Fortunately, in 2004 two large project grants were awarded, of which I was to be a recipient. As a result, these questions of life stories moved from my personal landscape of concern into the light of seriously funded research scrutiny.

It is always a moment of delicious ambivalence when a new project grant is awarded - one is pleased that personal concerns have become publicly examined issues, but also worried about the scrutiny, unsure of the ‘traction’ of the ideas, as well as slightly miffed that one’s enduring personal preoccupations have been, so to speak, ‘outed’.

The two projects that were sponsored neatly joined my previous work on professional life stories with a much broader canvas of investigation. The first, entitled ‘Professional knowledge in education and health: restructuring work and life between state and citizens in Europe’ (the Professional Knowledge project) (2003–2007), was commissioned by the Education Panel of the European Commission. It was a seven-country, multi-site study covering Finland, Sweden, Ireland, England, Greece, Spain and Portugal. The study collected the life histories or ‘work life narratives’ of nurses and teachers. These were explored for their significance in response to new ‘systems narratives’ or governmental reforms. Here, one could see how personal life stories clash, or harmonize, with – or decouple from – government agendas. Without oversimplifying a complex equation, it was certainly possible to see what a vital ingredient the personal life story was in understanding the response to structural, government initiatives. We began to see how the personal story ‘refracts’ and reinterprets, or sometimes substantially redirects, a governmental initiative. The life story material gave us access to the unpredictable element in social planning. We could see then just how efficacious the ‘DNA of the personal response’ embedded in the life story was in responding to structural interventions.

The second project got closer to examining the life stories and ‘DNA of personal response’ by focussing in detail on people’s learning across the life course. The Economic and Social Research Council in the UK decided to launch a Teaching and Learning Program. Substantially funded, it aimed to understand how a range of people learn, not particularly in educational institutions but also informally and actively throughout the life course. As a result our own project, entitled ‘Learning lives: identity, agency and learning’ (the Learning Lives project) (2003–2008), was co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Studying Life Narratives
• Part 2 On Forms of Narrativity
• References
• Index