Narrative Research is a kind of journey.

Chp. 5--Entry in the midst

“As researchers, we come to each new inquiry field living our stories. Our participants also enter the inquiry field in the midst of living their stories. Their lives do not begin the day we arrive nor do they end as we leave. Their lives continue. Furthermore, the places in which they live and work, their classrooms, their schools, and their communities, are also in the midst when we researchers arrive. Their institutions and their communities, their landscapes in the broadest sense, are also in the midst of stories” (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, pp. 63-64)

Chp. 5—The centrality of our own story

“…the importance of acknowledging the centrality of the researcher’s own livings, tellings, retellings, and relivings. One of the starting points for narrative inquiry is the researcher’s own narrative of experience, the researcher’s autobiography. This task of composing our own narratives of experience is central to narrative inquiry. We refer to this as composing narrative beginnings as a researcher begins his or her inquiries” (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 70)

Robert Wallace: This Wild Strange Place

Literacy of West Virginia, includes his grandmother’s story of the place and his daughter reading

Part 1

Put your name and email address at the top of this paper. (You will be sharing what you write with one trusted and supportive reader near the end of this class.)

“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads were blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is the strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself” (opening note, William Least Heat Moon [also known as William Trogdon], Blue Highways. A Journey into America, Fawcett Crest: New York, 1982).

Freewrite

Tell the story of your travel here, to IUP, to the C&T program, into the adventure of doing research. Tell the story of your dissertation journey. This writing is primarily for YOURSELF. You only need share as much as you want.

Describe the journey.

·  What’s the road/path like?

·  What’s the trip/journey like?

·  Describe your journey to IUP.

·  Describe your journey into/through this course.

Describe yourself as a traveler.

·  What are you like?

·  Where did you come from?

·  Where are you going?

Describe your luggage.

·  What are you bringing with you?

·  Who is coming with you?

·  What’s being left behind?

Describe your map.

·  What’s your dissertation plan?

·  What do you look forward to?

·  What will be hard?

Describe your destination.

·  Why take the trip?

·  What are you hoping to see?

·  What detours might be worth taking as you go?

Part 2

Focus in on your dissertation study.

·  What is your current (even if only vagueeee) idea?

·  What are your research questions or, if you prefer, what is the research puzzle you might explore?

·  How do you plan to pursue this study? What data might you collect? What methods could you use?

·  How might you enhance your study by reflecting on the 3-dimensional inquiry space Clandinin and Connelly describe? (interaction, continuity, situation/context).

·  Discuss how you might collect data to illuminate one or more of these 3-dimensions

You don’t have to be doing a narrative study to do this exercise. This is NOT meant to be a solicitation for students (I’m overloaded as it is!). Your task is to think about your work in terms of Clandinin and Connelly’s ideas


Part 3

1.  Trade places with someone and read what they have written

2.  Then write a letter to that other researcher to help them on their journey.

3.  This should be a supportive letter.

4.  This also ought to be a letter the person could go back to from time to time, perhaps a letter to print out and save.

5.  Type your letter in Microsoft Word.

o  Use some artwork or format>background to jazz up the border/color/imagery of the letter.

6.  Send the letter to the person on email as an attachment.

The letter is meant to be read later, at a quiet moment.