The SAGE Handbook of Educational Action

Research
The Interconnections between Narrative Inquiry and
Action Research

By:Debbie Pushor & D. Jean Clandinin

Edited by: Susan E. Noffke & Bridget Somekh
Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Educational Action Research
Chapter Title: "The Interconnections between Narrative Inquiry and Action Research"
Pub. Date: 2009
Access Date: May 13, 2022
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9781412947084
Online ISBN: 9780857021021
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857021021.n27
Print pages: 290-300
© 2009 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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The Interconnections between Narrative Inquiry and Action Research

The interconnections between narrative inquiry and action research
DebbiePushor and D. JeanClandinin

Writing a chapter on the interrelationships between narrative inquiry and action research may seem to be
a contradiction for some people. Many authors (Rosiek and Atkinson, 2005; Creswell et al., 2007; Hara,
1995) cite narrative inquiry as distinct from action research and refer to them as two genres of qualitative
research. Partly this contradiction about whether action research and narrative inquiry are distinct genres
of research relates to the broad range of what counts as narrative inquiry. Reissman and Speedy (2007)
note that ‘[n]arrative inquiry in the human sciences is a 20th-century development’ (p. 428) and that the field
‘has “realist,” “modernist,” “post-modern,” and “constructionist” strands, and scholars disagree on origins and
precise definition’ (p. 428).

Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) who also note distinctions between narrative inquiry and other forms of
qualitative research; see, however, ‘real differences of opinion on the epistemological, ideological, and
ontological commitments of narrative inquirers as well as real differences with those who do not identify as
narrative inquirers’ (p. 37). This provides an entry point into our (Debbie and Jean's) argument that, for some
narrative inquirers, there is an interrelationship with action research, at least there is if we understand action
research as research that results in action or change in the practices of individual researchers, participants,
and institutional practices. In this chapter we take on the task of exploring these interconnections between
narrative inquiry and action research understood from this perspective. Also, we draw on Jean's earlier
theoretical conceptualizations of narrative inquiry undertaken with Michael Connelly. We then move on to
exploring other views of narrative inquiry where the links with action and change are less apparent. Drawing
on our own and others’ studies we make explicit the changes in inquirers, in participants, and on landscapes
through narrative inquiry.

An Argument for Shared Epistemological and Ontological Commitments

Connelly and Clandinin (1990, 2006) observed that arguments for the development and use of narrative
inquiry are inspired by a view of human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied
lives. We begin with Connelly and Clandinin's (2006) definition of narrative inquiry:

People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms
of these stories. Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which
their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful. Narrative inquiry, the study of
experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as a
methodology entails a view of the phenomenon. To use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a particular
view of experience as phenomenon under study. (p. 375)

In their definition we may, at first, see narrative inquiry as pointing toward a static, interpretive view of
experience, one that would not easily align with action research. There appears, in that definition, little
attention to the sense of narrative inquiry as involving a narrative understanding of experience as more than
lived and told stories. Narrative inquiry also involves the retelling of stories through the relational inquiry
process that may result in subsequent reliving of stories in changed practices and actions. It is in moving
beyond the definition of narrative inquiry to the idea of the shared relational narrative inquiry space that the
connections to action become sharper. Relationships live at the heart of narrative inquiry.

Narrative inquiry is the study of experience, and experience, as John Dewey taught, is a matter of people
in relation contextually and temporally. Participants are in relation, and we as researchers are in relation
to participants. Narrative inquiry is an experience. It is people in relation studying with people in relation.
(Clandinin and Connelly, 2000: 189)

Clandinin and Connelly (1998) develop these ideas as they explore the interrelationships of narrative inquiry
and educative experiences. They situate their ideas of story living and story telling as central in

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[o]ur collaborative work because we see the pursuit of these activities as directly connected with life and
education. Narrative and storytelling allow us to link teachers' and children's lives with a concept of education.
It iseducation that is at the core of our enterprise and not merely the telling of stories. We see living an
educated life as an ongoing process. People's lives are composed over time: biographies or life stories are
lived and told, retold and relived. For us education is interwoven with living and with the possibility of retelling
our life stories. As we think about our own lives and the lives of teachers and children with whom we engage,
we see possibilities for growth and change. As we learn to tell, to listen and to respond to teachers' and
children's stories, we imagine significant educational consequences for children and teachers in schools and
for faculty members in universities through more mutual relations between schools and universities. No one,
and no institution, would leave this imagined future unchanged. (pp. 246–47)

In their narrative conceptualizations of experience and education they make it clear that:

[t]he promise of storytelling in education emerges when we move beyond regarding a story as a fixed entity
and engage in conversations with our stories. The mere telling of a story leaves it as a fixed entity. It is in
the inquiry, in our conversations with each other, with texts, with situations, and with other stories that we can
come to retelling our stories and to reliving them. (p. 251)

These ideas of story living and telling, retelling and reliving are central features in their, and our, particular view
of narrative inquiry. For them, the inquiry into narrative, stories lived and told, creates spaces, gaps, which
allow for change. Within their conceptualization, there are clear connections between narrative inquiry and a
broad view of action research. Our (Jean and Debbie's) work picks up and builds from their conceptualization.

Not all approaches to narrative inquiry see this connection to growth and change. In the opening paragraph
we noted the range of methodological strands within narrative inquiry. We use Clandinin and Connelly's
(1995) metaphor of a professional knowledge landscape to describe social context or milieu. They see the
landscape metaphor as allowing us ‘to talk about space, place, and time … and the possibility of being
filled with diverse people, things, and events in different relationships… Because we see the professional
knowledge landscape as composed of relationships among people, places, and things, we see it both as an
intellectual and moral landscape’ (pp. 4–5). Some people who work in narrative inquiry would see their work
as descriptive or analytic and, while the findings might point toward the importance of change in person, action
or ‘landscape’, undergoing the research in and of itself does not lead to change. For example, Atkinson (1995)
sees narrative inquiry through life story interviews as helping the storyteller, listener, reader, and researcher to
understand how life stories serve psychological, sociological, spiritual and/or philosophical functions. Change
may not be involved. Elbaz-Luwisch (2007) makes a different, more context dependent point, as she notes
that:

One of the central questions that arises when one considers the development of narrative inquiry in K-12
settings concerns the possibility of establishing narrative inquiry as part of the ongoing development work of
the school and as a format for the continuing professional development of teachers. (pp. 373–4)

She notes, ‘I would argue that collaborative inquiry is an important goal and ideal to be held up, but that
each particular inquiry may fall short in different ways, depending on the unique situation’ (p. 374). In Elbaz-
Luwisch's view, while the connection between narrative inquiry and change is an ideal, context may not
support such work.

Mattingly (2007), arguing from a different stance, also points toward the connection between stories, both
lived and told, and change. She sees the nature of experience, including therapy, as narrative construction.
Although she does not say so explicitly, we see in her work the possibility that while studying experience,
including therapy, as narrative construction enables her to change her practice in more therapeutic healing
ways, there is not change for the participants through the inquiry. Change occurs for the patients because of
the therapy, not because of the patients’ participation in the research. There could, however, be change in the
landscape as these ways of understanding therapy become a more dominant aspect of how we understand
experience.

In the next sections, we make explicit the ways in which narrative inquiry leads to change: change in the

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researchers; change in the participants; change in the institutional, social or cultural landscapes; change in
the readers of the narrative inquiry.

Change in the Narrative Inquirers

McNiff (2007) makes explicit the links she sees between narrative inquiry and action research. For her,
narrative inquiry and action research are linked as research ‘that enables practitioner researchers to tell
their stories of how they have taken action to improve their situations by improving their learning. They
explain how reflecting on their action can lead to new learning, which can inform future learning and action’
(p. 308). Drawing on Whitehead's (1989) ideas of living educational theories of practice, she notes that
practitioner researchers’ ‘stories comprise their description and explanations of practice’ (p. 308) and, through
these stories, these living educational theories of practice, ‘they are able to show how they hold themselves
accountable for what they are doing and why they are doing it’ (p. 308).

Pushor's (2001) narrative inquiry into the positioning of parents in relation to school landscapes provides
an example of a practitioner researcher holding herself accountable for an alignment of her beliefs and
knowledge with her lived practice. Pushor began her year-long narrative inquiry having lived an educator's
story of schooling. Positioned as teacher, consultant, principal and central services supervisor, and in various
places, she believed she knew school landscapes well. When her oldest son began school, her sense of
knowing was disrupted as she was awakened to the apparent lack of voice and place for parents on school
landscapes. Entering Gardenview School, Pushor lived alongside educators and parents both in and outside
of the school – in meetings, professional development sessions, special events and day-to-day activities,
sometimes a character in the stories being lived out, sometimes an audience to, and a recorder of, them. In
research moments in which practices and policies in the school which positioned parents on the landscape
of the school – or in the margins of it – were foregrounded, Pushor was often drawn backward in time to her
own educator stories. In the midst of her inquiry, she was called to re-imagine and retell her own stories in
ways which shifted her sense of the educator she wanted to be in relation to parents. Pushor writes:

In response to Evelyn's [the principal's] reading of my story of [my son's] first day of school, we shared stories
of our experiences as principals with the first day of school. … With pic tures of [the school in which I had
been principal] vivid in my mind, I shared my recollections of moving from classroom to classroom, welcoming
back returning students and getting to know new students. I had to admit to Evelyn that parents were not a
significant part of my recalled images. (p. 53)

While Pushor (2001) storied herself as an educator who had good relations with parents and who valued their
shared conversations, she now asked herself hard questions about the absence of parents in her recalled
images. She turned to Greene's (1995) conceptualization of seeing big and seeing small, of viewing human
beings ‘in their integrity and particularity’ (p. 10) rather than ‘from a detached point of view, … from the
perspective of a system’ (p. 10). She asked, ‘In my role as educator, who and what did I see big? Who and
what did I see small?’ (p. 10).

As a teacher, I always planned extensively for that first day of school for children. … As a principal, I always
planned extensively for that first day of school for staff and for students. … Yet, now I wondered, who plans
that first day of school for parents? (p. 5)

She recognized she saw parents small; that she viewed them from a distance, as a given presence in the lives
of children. In her retelling she awakened to the fact she did not see or attend to parents in their integrity and
particularity in the same way in which she saw and attended to children and staff. As she retold her stories,
she saw possibilities for reliving these stories in new ways in the future. She began to attend to many aspects
of the taken-for-grantedness of school landscapes and of her work on these landscapes: the welcoming
of parents and families and the hospitality extended them; the assumptions underlying parent involvement
practices; and the implications of policies around such things as homework. She retold her experiences of
these policies and practices in new ways, ways in which she saw parents big – as integral to the life of the
school, as on the school landscape rather than in the margins of it.

Her retold stories, stories in which she re-imagined her experiences as an educator in relation to parents,
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began to be relived by her work as a teacher educator. In graduate and undergraduate courses, Pushor
includes content related to working with parents. She and teacher candidates engage in conversation about
their knowledge and beliefs regarding parents and how their knowledge and beliefs may be lived out in their
practice. In this reliving, she foregrounds ways to work alongside parents and families and to honor parents’
knowledge in program decisions as an integral consideration in what teachers do.

Engaged in narrative inquiries with epistemological and ontological commitments shared with action research,
researchers often experience shifts in their stories of themselves as told and lived in their practices, shifts
which create changes in themselves as researchers (Murray Orr, 2005; Pearce, 2005; Steeves, 2000) and
changes in their ‘claim to knowledge.’ ‘A claim to knowledge is the term used for when we say we have
learned something, or now believe something to be the case, or when we reconfigure existing knowledge
to create new knowledge’ (McNiff and Whitehead, 2005: 2). Through living and telling, retelling and reliving
stories of parents and parent stories in her narrative inquiry, Pushor's knowledge of parents and parents’
knowledge on school landscapes was reconfigured, and extended and deepened. As Dewey (1938) states,
‘Every experience,’ and we would add the study of that experience, ‘is a moving force. Its value can be judged
only on the ground of what it moves toward and into’ (p. 38). Pushor's experience moved her toward, and
into, a restorying of her identity as an educator with and alongside parents and into reliving her knowledge as
a teacher educator in ways educative to herself and others.

Change in Participants and Narrative Inquirers

Holding central Dewey's (1938) conception of experience as ‘characterized by continuous interaction of
human thought with our personal, social, and material environment’ (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007: 39), we
see rich possibilities for shifts and changes in participants' identities, and in their knowledge and practices,
as a result of their engagement in narrative inquiry. The inquiry ‘generates a new relation between a human
being and her environment – her life, community, world’ (p. 39). Nelson (2003) studied the experiences of
five Canadian teachers, including herself, as they participated in a professional development program with
Kenyan teachers. We see in Nelson's narrative inquiry, as in action research, a starting place situated in
teachers' experience, and in their stories of experience. When we return to those experiences at the close of
her inquiry, we see a retelling of both participants' and researchers’ experiences in the present which reflects
shifts and changes in their identities and in their subsequent reliving of their experiences as they move into
the future in new relation with the world.

Rather than focus on the ‘other’ as many suggested, Nelson focused on the experiences of the Canadian
teachers and narratively inquired into their experiences in Kenya, experiences of what she calls ‘the
borderlands’, to understand how moving to a different social, cultural landscape might shift their ever-evolving
teacher identities, their ‘stories to live by’ (Connelly and Clandinin, 1999). Nelson used Steedman's work
(1986) to characterize, what Nelson described as, stories from the borderlands as stories that serve as
‘disruption and essential counterpoint’ (p. 22), ‘stories that serve to interrupt and dislocate our life's continuity’
(Nelson, 2003: 86). Nelson notes that:

borderland-traveling happens in the space before one gets to the destination. … It is the space in between
which has been created by the recognition of difference, the recognition that my present identity has not yet
been allowed but is about to be formed by this new encounter. (p. 2)

Nelson emphasizes that ‘borderland’ travel has the potential to shift someone ‘from being one person to being
a different person’ (Lugones, 1987: 11). Nelson's narrative inquiry began in the midst of her own work and her
own storied identity. She then engaged each of the other four teachers in telling their stories of experience
prior to the experience of going to Kenya. Based on their stories, Nelson wrote and negotiated narrative
accounts that represented something of each participant's necessarily incomplete (Miller, 1998), fluid, multiple
and changing stories to live by (Connelly and Clandinin, 1999).

In the following months, the five teachers went to Kenya and worked in a professional development situation
with Kenyan teachers, living in a compound together with them, sharing meals, sharing classrooms. Nelson
described the borderland space as, … a space that allowed us to tell and retell our “stories to live by,” a
telling that was triggered by the experience we were living in that place at that time’ (p. 34). Subsequently, the
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teachers told stories to each other, to themselves and to Nelson. She wrote, ‘Some of the stories we told after
our experience were the same ones we had told previously. But this time, they were told a little differently
because we had been in the borderlands’ (p. 34).

Nelson makes visible that by coming to the metaphorical borderland spaces in wide awake ways and by
telling and retelling stories of experience, that is, by engaging in narrative inquiry, there was change in the
individual participants' stories to live by as well as in her own. The narrative inquiry, a living out of change in
who the participants were and were becoming, draws attention to how each of the participants experienced
what Clandinin and Connelly (2000) note:

We retell our stories, remake the past. … To do so is the essence of growth and, for Dewey, is an element
in the criteria for judging the value of experience. Dewey's reconstruction of experience (for us the retelling
and reliving of stories) is good in that it defines growth. Enhancing personal and social growth is one of the
purposes of narrative inquiry. (p. 85)

With the shared epistemological and ontological commitments between those engaged in narrative inquiry
and those engaged in action research, we see the changed actions of both participants and researchers
through the living out of the research. In Hollingsworth et al.'s (1994) long-term narrative inquiry, we clearly
see the changed action of participants and researchers in how they lived their practices in teaching, teacher
education and research.

Changing the Landscapes of Researchers and Participants Through the Inquiries

What became clear in Pushor's (2001) and in Nelson's (2003) work is that narrative inquiry can shift and
change the identities and practices of researchers and participants. Narrative inquiries can also shift the
landscapes on which the inquirers and participants are situated. The concept of ‘story constellations’ (Craig,
2003) provides a way to understand the changes that occur in the landscapes of researchers and participants
in narrative inquiries.

‘Story constellations’ has the capacity to make visible the complexities that shape school landscapes [and
teacher education landscapes], influence the nature of educators’ experiences, and determine who knows
and what is known both within, and about, the educational enterprise. The approach enables multifaceted
studies to be framed that take into account multiple clusters of stories, and many versions of stories
narrated by multiple tellers. Broad-grained shifts in school landscapes [and teacher education landscapes]
are subsequently constructed and reconstructed alongside individual and collective accounts of change. (p.
11)

As the identities of inquirers and participants are shaped through the retelling and reliving of their stories of
experience in the narrative inquiry, the landscapes on which they are situated also begin to change.

Nelson calls for a shift in the landscape of teacher education, a shift that would change the discourse of
teacher education. Drawing on the work of Vinz (1996) and Scott and Freeman-Moir (2000) she echoes their
call for attending to teacher identity formation in all discussions on teaching and learning. She writes, ‘By
paying attention to the shifting nature of teacher identities, we will have a greater chance that the reproductive
shifts we desire in society will occur because teachers will be more committed to ensuring that the shifts
take place – a commitment that comes from having been made aware of the benefit of the shifts that have
occurred in their own “stories to live by”’ (Nelson, 2003: 159). Story constellations of both individual and
collective accounts of shifts in the teachers' stories to live by, and the resulting commitment of teachers to the
benefit they have experienced because of these shifts, invite Nelson to call for a reconstruction of the teacher
education landscape to position identity formation as central in a teacher education curriculum.

Desrochers (2006) picked up Nelson's call for shifting the discourse of the landscape of teacher education by
conducting a further narrative inquiry with preservice teachers registered in a Canadian faculty of education.
Desrochers, interested in Nelson's work because of the possibility it offered for enriching the way that service
learning could be seen as a site for attending to the shifting nature of teacher identities, ‘involved participants
in volunteer work with children in after-school clubs located in culturally diverse and socially disenfranchised
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communities’ (p. 4). She used these experiences to create ‘states of disequilibrium’ for herself and the
preservice teachers in order to engage them in reflections on their stories to live by in relation to diversity.
Desrochers writes:

Using a concept of dispositioning participants' knowledge, I inquired into shifts in participants' personal
practical knowledge. Four key considerations emerged: learning about diversity begins with experience,
occurs in dispositioning contexts, occurs through relationships and occurs through reflection over time.
Inquiry-based service learning in the community with a reconceptualized teacher education curriculum for
diversity opens possible borderland spaces within which preservice teachers can engage in learning though
collaborative, on-going reflection on experience, for their own and future learners’ benefit. (p. 5)

In Desrochers' (2006) research, story constellations, again both individual and collective, around shifts in
preservice teachers' personal practical knowledge of diversity, prompt her to create borderland spaces within
teacher education landscapes where a curriculum for diversity can promote new stories to live by. We see
that these narrative inquiries shift not only researchers’ and participants' lived and told stories but they may
also cause shifts in the landscapes of both participants and others who live on similar landscapes.

Another compelling example of a narrative inquiry that not only shifted the lived and told stories of participants,
both children and a teacher, and the researcher but also the landscape of schools in Kenya becomes visible
in the work of Mwebi (2005). Engaging in a narrative inquiry with Kenyan children and their teacher, Mwebi
studied their experiences of working in an experiential inquiry approach to HIV/AIDS. The narrative inquiry
shifted the landscape to a more open conversation around the pandemic.

Resonant Readings Leading to Change

In the foreword to Craig's book on narrative understandings of school reform, Davis (2003) writes:

Through [Craig's] narratives, she invites readers to think beyond the text, never unproductively just to do
something like someone else did. On the basis of their own reflections and pondering only, her readers can
imagine the prospects of how they might work in their own totally different situations, with altogether different
colleagues and leadership, and with utterly different resources. Craig's narratives are grist for intellectual
imagination and wonderment, neither a script to be followed nor plans to be implemented. (p. viii)

Davis, using Craig's work as an example, captures the possibility for resonant readings of the research texts
composed through narrative inquiries. Through resonant reading of Craig's, Pushor's, Nelson's, Desrochers'
and others’ research texts, the storied qualities of the texts invite readers to pull forward their own stories of
experience and to retell and relive them in newly imagined ways. For example, Pushor reports that readers of
her text often say to her, ‘You've written my story!’ Her parent stories and her stories of parents call forward
their own stories. Keats Whelan, a teacher, after reading Pushor's story of her first Meet the Teacher Night
as a parent, exclaimed she would not think of that school practice in the same way again. She spoke of
how her fear, as a new teacher, of being unable to answer questions parents may ask her about curriculum
prompted her to fill the time allotted with her own talk (Personal communication, 1999). Seeing through a
parent's lens, feeling the silencing and exclusion of parents’ knowledge in relation to curricular and program
decisions, Keats Whelan began to plan for a new structuring of that event. Pushor's story evoked change in
Keats Whelan's lived and told stories. Through a process of resonant reading, readers of narrative inquiries
begin to re-imagine themselves and their landscapes in new ways.

Concluding Thoughts
While some might argue that narrative inquiry and action research are distinct genres of research, we see the
interrelatedness through the ways both can lead to change and action. Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) wrote:

Beginning with a respect for ordinary lived experience, the focus of narrative inquiry is not only a valorizing of
individuals’ experience but also an exploration of the social, cultural and institutional narratives within which
individuals’ experiences were constituted, shaped, expressed, and enacted – but in a way that begins and
ends that inquiry in the storied lives of the people involved. Narrative inquirers study an individual's experience
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in the world and, through the study, seek ways of enriching and transforming that experience for themselves
and others. (p. 42)

We see in this conception of narrative inquiry, the possibility for making more explicit the action and change
through narrative inquiry. Calling on narrative inquirers to explicate more carefully the change that unfolds
through and in the inquiry will help others to be more attentive to possibilities for action.

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• narratives
• inquiry
• borderlands
• teacher education
• storytelling
• action research
• life story

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857021021.n27

The SAGE Handbook of Educational Action Research

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