Narrative inquiry

Narrative inquiry is another model for shared professional learning that supports interactive professionalism. It is based on two assumptions:

• human lives are woven from stories;
• people construct their identities through their own and others’ stories.

The narrative inquiry technique involves creating a series of experiential narratives. The inquirer collaborates with the participants in an inquiry to record field notes, interviews, journals, letters, autobiographies, and oral stories and to use this material to create mutually constructed stories out of all of their lives.

Connelly and Clandinin (2000) recommend narrative inquiry as a way of capturing and investigating people’s individual, social, and cultural identities as they live them. Reading their stories gives others the opportunity to hear the participants’ voices and to critically reflect on their experiences.

We came to think of teacher knowledge in narrative terms, and to describe it in terms of narrative life constructions. The stories these narratives are built on are both personal, reflecting a person’s life history, and social, reflecting the professional knowledge contexts in which teachers live.

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Gartner, Latham, and Merritt (1996) consider the value and purpose of narrative inquiry for professional learning in a range of fields. They suggest that:

The applications for narrative in an academic context are as varied as the stories themselves. Narrative enquiry gives permission to learners to tap into the tacit knowledge embedded in their experience as well as to learn from each other in the process. It also serves as a springboard for dialogue about the deeper issues of their professional discipline that may not be easily illuminated through other methods. Because narratives rely strongly on communication and relationships, they can facilitate connections between people and create a sense of “shared history”. Thus the environmental context for learning becomes one that supports the strengthening of collegiality and collaboration, and builds self esteem (Lindesmith, 1994).

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