While researching the topic of narrative inquiry, I found the importance of it in education. The article “Narrative Inquiry as Pedagogy in Education: The Extraordinary Potential of Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving Stories of Experience” explains narrative inquiry
… as attending to and acting on experience by co-inquiring with people who interact in and with classrooms, schools, or in other contexts into living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories of experience … (Huber et al. 2013)
Narrative inquiry speaks to the impact of stories in our lives. Narrative inquiry is in teacher education, but Huber et al. (2013) and others seek to expand it into the classroom allowing for pedagogical impacts in other classrooms. An interesting quote states that a story is all one might need: “Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put stories into each others’ memory” (Lopez, 1990, p. 60 as cited in Huber et al., 2013). Through this and later discussion and references, narrative inquiry is revealed to have many uses. Huber et al. (2013) explains the emergence of narrative inquiry and the use of narrative in fields of social science. In fields like anthropology, they switch the approach from an objective view to a perspective narrative, which gave more depth to understanding societies. This is seconded in the field of psychology where the narrative is used in understanding the self and others. An important highlight is an autobiographical inquiry, which uses narrative inquiry to understand the past and states that autobiographical inquiry is “a fundamental tool for ethical and moral recollection” (Freeman, 2010, as cited in Huber et al., 2013). The author continually highlights the importance of the narrative now and in the past, referencing many uses and findings about narrative in scholarly research.
In terms of education, the authors highlight John Dewey as bringing light to narrative and how Dewey believed that “Education is life and life is education, and to study life, to study education, is to study experience”(Huber et al., 2013). With Dewey being quite influential, the authors are giving the idea and use of narrative inquiry a sense of legitimacy by using his name. They continue this legitimacy and need for narrative in education by speaking about current scholars researching the need for narrative inquiry in life and teaching: “ … narrative is both phenomenon and method. Narrative names the structured quality of experience to be studied and it names the patterns of inquiry for its study” (Clandinin and Connelly, 1994, as cited in Huber et al., 2013). The quote about narrative reveals value for using it in education, but also shows how it is much more than narrative but a tool for life. The authors continue by expressing narrative inquiry’s usefulness as a tool for teacher education and in the classroom. The authors summarize the past and current understanding of narrative inquiry in depth. Narrative inquiry continues to grow on ideas but speaks about the “three-dimensional narrative inquiry space” as a way to connect and understand each other (Huber et al., 2013). Narrative inquiry is explained as always progressing and is a continual task of creating new understandings. With narrative inquiry, school is “ … more than a mere telling of facts, or stories” (Huber et al., 2013). “Counterstories” are even brought up because school are not deeming narrative important, but only “compliance, silence, and test scores” and now, with narrative, it brings life and meaning to the education space, and allows for impactful narratives (Huber et al., 2013).
After researching the past of narrative inquiry and its uses in many fields from this article, I need to find more statistical impact of it’s use in the classroom. I am also quite interested in using this in my own teachings, primarily because I love detail, so I will be researching how it can be effectively implemented. As someone who will be teaching history, I find this is an excellent way to understand the past by using multiple narratives and putting ourselves in past mindsets. As someone who also wants to be a writer, I will research how fictionalized narratives impact people.
References
Clandinin D. J. & Connelly F. M. (1994). Personal experience methods. In Denzin N., Lincoln Y. (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp. 413–427). Sage.
Freeman M. (2010). Hindsight: The promise and peril of looking backward. Oxford University Press.
Huber, J., Caine, V., Huber, M., & Steeves, P. (2013). Narrative Inquiry as Pedagogy in Education: The Extraordinary Potential of Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving Stories of Experience. Review of Research in Education, 37(1), 212–242. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0091732X12458885
Lopez B. (1989). Crossing open ground. Vintage Books.
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