(Annotations for the following chapters are taken from the introduction to the book itself, written by Ruthellen Josselson, 2002)
Introduction
Research based on studying whole persons in context and in time through the narratives of their experience is enjoying a renaissance across the social sciences. In considering people as constuctors of their experience, such research takes a giant step away from parsing human experience into predefined "variables" and requires of the researcher an equally major shift in perspective and approach. Rather than forming hypotheses, the researcher frames questions for exploration; in place of measurement are the challenges of deeply listening to others; and instead of statistics are the ambiguities of thoughtful analysis of texts. These shifts in task and epistemological foundation require a new set of skills of the researcher and raise important questions about how such skills are learned and taught. Read complete introduction at APA website now.
1. Painting Lessons
Suzanne Ouellette
Suzanne Ouellette details in an inspiring way how lessons from her painting classes helped her understand the processes of teaching narrative research. She draws illuminating parallels between learning to paint and learning to do narrative research--and I have been struck by how meaningful her paper has been to my students who have read it in draft form. Unlike the linearity of hypothesis-testing research, narrative research involves what Ouellette describes as working simultaneously on all four quadrants of a blocked-out painting. The actual doing of narrative research requires recursive exploration until a whole image emerges--procedure, theory, results and conceptualization forming a meaningful Gestalt. Like painting, it also requires inspiration, passion, and conviction--and we, as teachers, must nurture these in our students.
2. Braiding Essence: Learning What I Thought I Already Knew about Teaching Qualitative Research
Margot Ely
In her own writing, Margot Ely takes seriously what narrative researchers often stress as making the form follow the content. Rather than being a linear piece in academic style, Elyıs essay tries to capture process by interweaving themes to bring interrelationships among experiences into view. Herself open to learning through experience, she gains insight into the similarities between teaching a fifth-grade public school group and teaching her graduate students. Both groups of students thrive when they can be prodded to shake off the fetters they have acquired in their education and to trust their own capacity to know and discover. In her evocatively-written article which renders the emotional aspects of teaching this work, Ely gives us a very close-up look at how she teaches (and learns) and offers much detail for others to learn from as well as.
3. An Epistemological Approach to the Teaching of Narrative Research
Blythe McVicker Clinchy
Blythe Clinchy also describes her intellectual path to narrative research and draws on the developmental theory she and others presented in Women's Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule, 1986/1997) to understand the differing capacities students bring to learning narrative research. The processes of understanding others' meanings and seeing the world from anothers' perspective are different for the separate, the subjective and the connected knower and require different responses from the teacher. She details how this framework might inform pedagogy and practice in classes about narrative research and shares her own experiences in creating a course based on connected knowing.
4. Qualitative Research in Psychology: Teaching an Interpretive Process
Annie G. Rogers
Annie Rogers begins with stories of her own intellectual journey as a way of portraying the particularities of a narrative point of view. She ends by considering the issues of teaching qualitative research within traditional research environments. In contrast to quantitative approaches which value researcher facelessness and distance, in qualitative research, "One aspires to be influenced and changed by the process, and to grapple actively with the inter-subjective nature of understandings gleaned from complicated social relationships." Rogers details the pitfalls inherent in all aspects of mentoring this process, from the genesis of the research idea to the writing of the research report and offers both students and teachers lucid and detailed ideas about approaching and evaluating such research.
5. Narrative Teaching of Qualitative Research
Colette Daiute and Michelle Fine
Colette Daiute and Michelle Fine, who together teach a course in qualitative methods, detail how they use narrative theory to develop in their students what they term "a qualitative stance." This involves operating from a highly particular critical epistemological position in relation to the questions asked, materials collected, practices of analysis and interpretation, and process of writing. These authors recognize the balance between courage and anxiety that students must employ in order to arrive at this stance. In their approach to teaching, narrative research is construed as an opportunity to learn, not prove oneself correct, and the elusive nature of 'truths' is offered as a pleasure rather than a frustration. In their chapter, Daiute and Fine present the thorny questions students ask and how they, as teachers, approach their exploration.
6. Learning to Listen: Narrative Principles in a Qualitative Research Methods Course
Susan E. Chase
In her contribution, Susan Chase stresses the need for listening well in interview-based research and discusses the ways in which knowledge of the processes of narrative analysis recursively shape the capacity to listen. "When we listen carefully to the stories people tell, we learn how people as individuals and as groups make sense of their experiences and construct meanings and selves," writes Chase. Thus, people's narratives reflect not only their own meaning-making but the themes of the society or culture in which they live. In a manner that will be highly useful to both students and teachers, Chase offers lively details about how her course teaches students to use the principles of narrative analysis to ground their interviewing practice.
7. Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Interpreting a Repeated Story
Henry Greenspan
Henry Greenspan is also concerned with issues of listening. Years of listening to Holocaust survivors recount their experiences has taught him how intricate this process can be. An example interview fragment he presents to his class serves as a way of demonstrating how he raises and addresses questions about the process and meanings of memory, retelling and the role of narrative in an individual life. This model also serves to highlight the enigmas of critical listening and the fragility of human communication in general.
8. Teaching Interpretation
Richard Ochberg
Richard Ochberg takes a microscopic look at teaching interpretation. Beginning with his discovery of the impossibility of writing a "rulebook" for this process, he describes how he uses TAT stories to arrive at clusters of meanings. What he aims to teach his students is that meaning comes from how a narrative is constructed, not just its content. Further, Ochberg reflects on the nature of interpretation itself and how it is shaped by the standpoint and goals of the interpreter. Throughout, Ochberg engages us in the conversations he has with his students and offers a close reading of a text that students could use as a model.
9. Task, Process, and Discomfort in the Interpretation of Life-History
George C. Rosenwald
George Rosenwald explores the pedagogical strategies necessary for the project of trying to make psychobiographical sense of an individual life. Although students often approach this task with great enthusiasm, the actual analysis of a life presents often daunting challenges. Cultural values which highlight adaptation as a source of motivation often blind students to the subjectivities that shape a life. Why, for example, was Emily Dickinson shy - and what would constitute a satisfactory explanation? Rosenwald offers a thoughtful analysis of culturally-based resistances that students must overcome when trying to analyze a life, and he demonstrates how students can be helped to view lives in complex, internal and multidetermined ways.
10. The Prototypical Scene: A Method for Generating Psychobiographical Hypotheses
William Todd Schultz
Trying to understand life experiences of others with regard to individually specific meanings is also a concern of Todd Schultz. His approach to teaching this material is through the process of identifying "prototypical scenes" in a life. Schultz has found, in his teaching, that these scenes provide an anchoring device and that this approach assists students in orienting themselves to a life history. Schultz offers analyses of such prototypical scenes in the lives of Kathryn Harrison, Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath as a way of demonstrating how he and his students identify and analyze a scene that epitomizes and illuminates a life. (READ ENTIRE CHAPTER HERE)
11. A Psychological Perspective on the Relationship between William and Henry James
James William Anderson
James Anderson, in his chapter, details his thinking and decision-making as he writes, demonstrating how a psychobiographer actually operates. He approaches the problem of teaching about psychobiography by offering an annotated version of a paper he is writing about the relationship between the brothers Henry and William James. Accompanying this illustrious psychobiographer as he works offers both teachers and students a very focused look at the thinking and choices that underlie writing life history.
12. Writers as Readers in Narrative Inquiry: Learning from Biography
Steven Weiland
Steve Weiland offers his ideas about guiding novice scholars toward recognition of the role of writing in their research. He believes that it is their experiences as readers that can inspire and inform their work as authors of narrative. Thus, the art of writing in narrative research rests in wide reading of other scholarship, especially works in which authors have made their narrative strategies relatively transparent. Weiland discusses the innovations found in a number of texts in life history writing as a means of encouraging students to reflect on their own expository and narrative choices.
13. Constructing through Conversation: Developing Discourses of Narrative Research
Mary Gergen and Sara N. Davis
Mary Gergen and Sara Davis take us behind the scenes of a collaborative research project they carried out and offer a retrospective of their conversations as research collaborators. The questions they asked themselves and each other at each stage of their research, and the highlights of their discussions form a template of how investigators develop knowledge in narrative research. Writing from a social constructionist viewpoint, these authors trace the chronicle of their own learning over an extended period of time. In the form of a kind of annotated drama, Gergen and Davis enact what classroom collaboration, stressed by many of our other contributors as a key aspect of learning to do narrative research, might look like. The heart of narrative research, these authors stress, is in how one asks questions - at many levels and throughout the process.
14. A Framework for Narrative Research Proposals in Psychology
Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich
The matter of the evolving nature of narrative research questions, though, can be a thorny one, and never more anxiety-provoking for students than when they must submit a dissertation proposal, especially in more traditional social science departments. Amia Lieblich and I address the ubiquitous problem of students in most graduate departments of psychology trying, like Procrustes, to wrench their narrative research projects into proposal models that are designed for quantitative research. Students contort themselves to address in their dissertation proposals what hypotheses they are testing - when narrative research does not test hypotheses, or they find themselves writing long exegeses on the philosophical foundations of narrative research in hopes of persuading their academic committees that their approach is valid. At their committee meetings, they often have to defend themselves for not knowing at the outset what they will learn from their research or exactly how many participants they will study. In our chapter, we offer a model for proposals for qualitative/narrative research that is based on compatible principles of approach and organization - a model that has already been adopted at a number of universities.