Pergamon

Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 125-130, 1997 Copyright Q 1997 ElsevierScience Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0742-051X/97 $17.00+ 0.00

S0742-051X(96)00032-7

A SAMPLE CARD OF NARRATIVES

IN EDUCATION

GEERT K E L C H T E R M A N S
U n i v e r s i t y o f L e u v e n , Belgium

A N ESSAY REVIEW OF N A R R A T I V E I N TEACHING, LEA R N I N G A N D R E S E A R C H

Hunter McEwan & Kieran Egan (Eds.) (1995). New York: Teachers College Press. (ISBN 0-8077-3399-7)

Thirteen different authors in thirteen chapters present thirteen different instances of narratives in education. They very well illustrate the pervasive and wide-ranging impact of the recent "turn to narrative" in this field. Ever more educationalists acknowledge the fundamental role of narrative in human action and thinking, and thus in education. In their introduction the editors situate the book in this trend and subscribe to it: "narratives form a framework within which our discourses about human thought and possibility evolve, and they provide the structure and functional backbone for very specific explanations of this or that educational practice" (p. xiii). The categories teaching, learning and educational research are used to divide the book in three parts. This however is a loose and pragmatic structure. All chapters contain elements of research and some of the "learning" chapters might as well have been situated in the part on teaching. The editors aim at providing the reader with "a series of progress reports that will help, first, to clarify some of the theoretical issues in the study of narrative in teaching and learning, and, second, to identify some of the opportunities and applications that such a study implies for educational practice" (p. viii). And that is what the book does indeed. No more, no less. Especially for those who from diverse sections of the educational field have become curious about narrativity, this book can certainly operate as an "appetizing"

sample card to get a flavour of the multiple significance and possibilities of narratives in teaching, learning and educational research. However, I found reviewing a sample card not an easy thing to do. I have been struggling with the large diversity in focus, approach, content and relevance in the chapters. The lack of a coherent frame within which the different contributions were situated, didn't really make my job easier. Finally I gave up the attempt to write the missing synthesis myself and confined this essay review to a commenting walkthrough the sample card.

Narrative in Teaching Common to all narrative approaches in education is the move beyond the linearity and rationality of technological views of teaching. In these conceptions teaching is understood as an instrument to achieve clearly defined learning results: teaching as a meansends-chain. The narrative approaches on the contrary aim of grasping more fully the specific and complex nature of the teaching-learning process. They restore the judgement of a situation by the teacher as an essential process in teaching. Teachers' judgement involves more than mere technical decisions on teaching strategies or learning content (Hargreaves, 1995). It also has moral, emotional and political aspects. Teaching is then understood as 125

126

GEERT KELCHTERMANS for good teaching (Fenstermacher)--requires what Aristotle calls "situational appreciation". The typical characteristics of educational practice (mutable, indeterminate and particular) imply that teaching can never simply rely on the application of general principles or standing commitments. Wise practice demands "perceptive equilibrium", "deliberation undertaken from a vantage point of situational immersion and guided by imaginative discernment of the salient particulars of the situation" (p. 53). This implies a form of "reading" the situation as a story (narrative engagement) for stories allow one to understand best the salient particularities of a situation and to deliberate on the specific substance one gives to one's goals and commitments in concrete teaching situations. In order to judge and improve their practical reasoning, Pendlebury argues that teachers should engage in "narrative redescription": "In reflecting critically on his or her practice, the perceptive teacher has a story to tell--a story which relates obstacles overcome or still looming large; conflicts resolved, displaced, or deepened; turning points for better or worse; climaxes and culminations" (p. 64). In her chapter (Chapter 3), Carol Witherell presents a reflective and committed account of her own teaching. In one course she uses stories to explore and understand the meaning systems of gender and culture within a specific interpretive community and how they determine individual's social, cognitive, and moral responses to situations. The specific power of narrative, she argues, lies in the fact that "A good story engages and enlarges the moral imagination, illuminating possibilities for human thought, feeling, and action in ways that can bridge the gulf between different times, places, cultures, and beliefs." (p. 40). Stories thus not only have the power to inform or help understand situations and human action. They themselves also make things happen and change situations. This "transformative function" of stories is extensively discussed in the first chapter by Philip Jackson. Contrary to the technological approaches that aim at maximal efficacy through intentional m e a n s ~ n d s c h a i n s , the transformative effect of stories is never transparant nor guaranteed, Jackson argues. Neither are teachers always capable of exactly clarifying

committed, thoughtful action to influence pupils and students in order to change them "for the better", i.e. make them learn. Deliberation about action thus involves moral values (what is "right" or "just" or "better"), a concept of power (how can the working conditions in school and classroom be effectively influenced or controlled in order to allow good job performance; how is "power" dealt with in the different relations with pupils, colleagues, parents, school leader, etc) and feelings (satisfaction or dissatisfaction; doubts, guilt or proud, etc.). In other words, the process of deliberation and judgement in teaching, constitutes a much more complex phenomenon than mere rational and technical decisions about teaching strategies or curriculum content. Central in this deliberation and judgement is the careful perception and interpretation of the particularities of the situation against the background of more general goals, including knowledge, opinions, norms or values. This interplay of perception, deliberation, interpretation and committed action--that are so typical for teaching---can be effectively captured in narrative form. Although quite different in focus, all four chapters in the first part evolve around this idea. Sigrun Gudmundsdottir (Chapter 2) concentrates on the kind of knowledge teachers use in their teaching. She argues for a narrative conception of Shulman's notion of "pedagogical content knowledge": "Pedagogical content knowledge is mostly 'home made', developed on the job by working with texts, subject matter, and students in different contexts year after year, (...) Narratives and stories are the tools practitioners frequently use to make sense of experience and organize it into a body of practical knowledge" (p. 35). Through a narrative lens teachers construct their professional experiences into a subjective, coherent set of knowledge on curriculum content and how it is best taught. A core element in this process of constructing pedagogical content knowledge is the "pedagogical interpretation of a situation" (judgement). Shirley Pendlebury (Chapter 3) takes on the same idea in her analysis of "practical wisdom" in teaching, but focuses more on the processes of judgement, i.e. "practical reasoning". This practical reasoning--the basis

A Sample Card of Narratives in Education what they hope to establish through the stories they teach. There is intuition, thoughtfulness and reflection, but never full clarity or awareness. When teachers use stories "they read them or assign them in the hope that something good will come of such effort, yet they would be hard-pressed to say exactly what that good might be" (p. 22).

127

Narrative in Learning Whereas the first part mainly focuses on conceptions of teaching beyond the technological approach, the chapters on learning all turn around some fundamental anthropological implications of narrative approaches in learning (and teaching). These approaches reveal often neglected aspects and features of children's learning processes. In his chapter, Brian Sutton-Smith (Chapter 5) criticizes the over-deterministic, linear concepts of childrens' minds in structural developmental psychology. Systematically analyzing childrens' storytelling and narratives, he found that there is much more inter- and intra-individual difference in childrens' thinking, learning and development than commonly believed. These differences are reflected in his concept of the "multivocal mind, of the child, emphasizing a variety of developmental possibilities children can pursue, the complexity of their thinking, and features of their cognition in which they are commonly superior to adults" (p. 69). Children's storytelling and metaphoric capacities are such features and they are much better captured and understood in the multivocal mind-concept. In the final chapter of this part (Chapter 8), Kieran Egan explores the implications of thinking about the human mind as a "narrative concern". Closely observing children's learning from fairy tales brings him to question dominant "expanding horizon" models of curriculum. The guiding principle in that model is that learning implies association of new content with what one already knows. From his research, Egan argues for a "'binary discrimination/mediation model": children learn by developing mediating categories between the most basic discriminations we make among empirically discrete categories. An example is the

learning of the concept "cool" as a mediating concept between "cold" and "hot". Although Egan stresses that this approach to the mind as a narrative concern is not exclusive, he also argues that it deserves further development and, in any case, challenges the selfevidence of dominant curriculum principles. That teaching and learning in schools are a kind of "twin" processes, that are best thought of in terms of this interaction, is exemplified in the chapters by Paley and HaroutunianGordon. Vivian Gussin Paley (Chapter 6) describes how she uses children's natural storytelling competences to develop a sense of community in her kindergarten class. Mutual storytelling is the natural way strangers quickly become participating members of a society, she argues and this is true for a class as well. She concludes with a reflection about the relation between the real and the imagined: "Fiction blends with fact, not to deceive us, but, rather, to involve us in the emotional issues that underlie every event. Such is the role of storytelling: It helps us interpret and integrate new ideas into our story of familiar images and feelings by dramatizing their meanings and relationships" (p. 98). The role of emotions in the narrative teaching-learning process is also central in the next chapter by Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon. She demonstrates her use of interpretive discussions of narrative texts in courses on literature. Concluding she states that the meaning of narrative texts (i.e. a fragment of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) can transform the participants' ideas and attitudes, especially when the reader gets affectively connected with the situation presented by the text. As such her chapter exemplifies Jackson's concept of the transformative function of stories. Although the significance of narrative approaches in understanding and improving children's learning has only started to be studied, I think it would be fruitful to confront these narrative approaches systematically with the recent developments in instructional psychology, i.e. recent concepts of learning. Within this literature there has grown a broad consensus to think of learning as "a constructive, cumulative, self-regulated, goal-directed, situated, collaborative, and individually different process of meaning construction and

128

GEERT KELCHTERMANS Closely linked to the question of valid and reliable analysis of narrative data, is the issue of their production in the context of interactive processes between researcher and respondent. This is the central issue in the contribution by Ivor Goodson and Rob Walker (Chapter 11). For the applied researcher, they argue, the interesting thing about storytelling is that it captures the realm of the personal meaning and links it to the public domain: "the best of this research enters the world of the subjects and presents it to the outside with understanding and sensitivity, increasing the potential competence of the reader who enters similar situations" (p. 189). However, this process of linking the personal and the public, is not o n l y a technical issue of qualitative research methods, but also raises fundamental moral and political questions. Just as in the relation between teacher and pupil, between researcher and respondent there is a traditional imbalance in the power to control knowledge. Arguing for an "ethnography of ethnography" the authors conclude that "the problem for the researcher (...) is to retain a hold on specialized interests and areas of expertise in ways that avoid the temptation, indeed the expectation, that this legitimates control over information and its interpretation. We have to learn to be accountable to those we research at all stages of the enterprise, and to expect our motives to be questioned more openly." (p. 193). Robert J. Graham (Chapter 12) discusses a related aspect: the transformation and representation of storied experience into textual form. This is a process with rhetorical dimensions, he argues and an appropriate interpretation of narrative texts should therefore encompass a rhetorical analysis. Graham pleas for a "rhetoric of inquiry", in order to better understand the codified ways our culture has developed for telling stories. Romance and tragedy are two such culturally deeply rooted structural forms, that are widely used by writers in transforming experience into powerful, plausible and meaningful texts. These literary forms are not neutral, but can be used to privilege certain views of teachers and teaching, as well as to challenge others. In other words, this rhetoric of inquiry would make us more aware of the way narrative works as a "powerful ideological force in society": "the existence of

knowledge building" (De Corte in press). The narrow focus on cognitions in instructional psychological research has recently been broadened to also include emotional and motivational factors. I believe that a narrative approach of learning ("learning stories") not only allows capturing all three of these components, i.e. emotion, motivation and cognition, but also understanding them in their interplay. This is illustrated in several chapters of this book, but needs to be explored further. Another interesting perspective would be to examine the possible part narratives can play in the so-called "powerful teaching-learning environments", instructional psychologists argue for. The development of both instructional psychology and what could be called "educational narratology" would profit from such systematic and thorough dialogue.

Narrative in the Study of Teaching and Learning The narrative turn in educational research clearly raises a lot of important methodological issues. Several of them are adressed in the final part of the book. One of the most appealing chapters to me is Michael Huberman's on working with lifehistory narratives. Although he retakes several already published parts of his study on secondary teachers' careers in Switzerland (see e.g., Huberman, 1989; Huberman, Grounauer, & Marti, 1993), the particular importance of this chapter lies in the fact that it both presents a concrete study, and takes up important methodological and epistemological questions. In this chapter one reads the voice of the reflective researcher who critically examines his own work. Huberman asks fundamental questions about the quality of the data collected and the analysis procedures used, but immediately explicitates and accounts for the answers he himself has given in his study on teacher careers. Especially his thoughtful reflections about the analytical procedures for narrative data (i.e. progressive, interpretive condensation) and its validity, are very relevant. Too often essential matters like these remain implicit or simply taken for granted in narrative empirical research.

A Sample Card of Narratives in Education tragedy and romance as major cultural forms of storytelling ought to remind us that education is at once a narrative and political enterprise, and that the more we know about narrative and what it entails, the more we will also come to know about the storied nature of the politics of personal experience." (p. 208). Graham's chapter clearly illustrates how epistemological and methodological issues of thruth and interpretation are interwoven with political questions of power and influence. Nancy Zeller (Chapter 12) elaborates on the rhetorics in narrative research reporting. More specifically she explores the possibilities of new journalism as an alternative narrative strategy for case study reports. She argues that this strategy rests on the assumption that the primary goal of a case report is to create understanding and new meaning. This further implies that a case narrative should be a product rather than a record of research. The chapter by Hunter McEwan (Chapter 10) finally moves the discussion into the domain of philosophy of education and argues for a new program for the research in this field. The author criticizes the philosophical project of defining the essential nature of teaching. This essentialist program, he argues, should be abandoned in favour of a more hermeneutical approach. Teaching is a practice and as such always historically situated and part of a change process. In order to really understand educational practices one needs to collect the stories of the way they developed over time and context to the specific form they are having today. "We can only understand the nature of a practice when we set the picture in motion and trace the history of its constitutive elements: the actions, thoughts, language, and intentions that contribute to it and give it character and direction." (p. 180). A narrative approach to teaching--especially one using life histories (Kelchtermans, 1993)--not only allows understanding it as a socio-historically situated and developing set of practices (contextualised), but by doing so also opens up perspectives for changing, i.e. improving, existing practice. The issues discussed in the research part of this book are definitely crucial ones for the further development of narrative research: the impact of the context and process of data

129

production; procedures for valid and reliable data analysis; and the representation of these narratives. Closely linked to these issues is the question of changing teaching/learning practices through forms of collaborative research. This is a question that deserves thoughtful consideration and creative exploration by narrative researchers. If stories have or can have a transformative function, one should ask whether and how the process of narrative research induces changes in existing practices. Or, in other words, can narrative research indeed contribute to the improvement of practice and the empowerment of practitioners? In his critical analysis of narrative and biographical research so far, Goodson rightly rejects the assumption that "giving teachers voice" will automatically lead to teacher empowerment. He argues: "Only if we deal with stories as the starting point for collaboration, as the beginning of a process of coming to know, will we come to understand their meaning: to see them as social constructions which allow us to locate and interrogate the social world in which they are embedded" (Goodson, 1995, p. 98). He therefore argues for genuine forms of collaborative research that operate as viable trading points between researcher and respondent. With the sharing of stories, researcher and respondent would then start a process of critical reflective analysis of the context in which the stories are constructed and (re)presented. The issue of the politics and ethics of the research relationship, as discussed by Huberman, Goodson & Walker and Graham in this volume, thus would become linked to the transformative function of narrative, i.e. the improvement of practice. With Goodson I believe that this is a challenging and interesting program for narrative educational researchers, both epistemologically and methodologically as well as from the perspective of the improvement of teaching/learning practices (Kelchtermans, in press).

Not Beyond the Sample Card 1 think the metaphor of the "sample card" quite well depicts the character of this book. The different chapters address interesting and relevant topics and questions. But there is no

130

GEERT KELCHTERMANS development of the narrative field, would certainly have contributed to the book's quality and value. Their integration in such a synthesis would also have helped me understand why the editors found it important enough to include in the book several chapters that are reprints or only slightly adapted versions of earlier publications.

attempt to summarize or integrate the different contributions in a larger frame. Maybe such a synthesis would come too early. Maybe we should let the narrative approach in education proliferate further, to show its full richness. Something like "Let a thousand stories blossom". But as the editors already indicate in their introduction, the "territory of narrative as it applies to education (...) has become a rather disorienting intellectual milieu" (p. viii). That is exactly why I would have welcomed a more thorough attempt to present a structured overview of the narrative proliferation in teaching, learning and educational research. Just because of its "proliferating" character, I believe we do need at least better delineated and defined concepts. This would help us to keep (or regain) a clear overview on the field and facilitate scientific dialogue and discussion. Throughout the chapters of this book "narrative" or "story" are used by the different authors to point to very different things: e.g. the literary form of curriculum texts (narrative as teaching/learning medium); the cognitive processes during the interpretation of the text (narrative as a form of thinking); a characteristic of a specific sort of research data; etc. Apart from ordering the semantic field of the notions "narrative" and "story", a final chapter, providing a state of the art and drawing programmatic lines for fruitful further

References
Corte, E. De (in Press). Instructional psychology: An overview. In E. De Corte & F. R. Weinert (Eds.), International encyclopedia of developmental and instructional psychology. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Hargreaves, A. (1995) Development and desire. A postmodern perspective. In T. R. Guskey & M. Huberman (Eds.), Professional development in education. New paradigms & perspectives (pp. 9 34). New York: Teachers College Press. Huberman, M. (1989). The professional life cycle of teachers. Teachers College Record, 91(1), 31-57. Huberman, M., Grounauer, M., & Marti, J. (1993). The lives of teachers. London: Cassell. Goodson, I. (1995). The story so far: Personal knowledge and the political. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 89 98. Kelchtermans, G. (1993). Getting the stories, understanding the lives: From careers stories to teachers' professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 9(5/6), 443-456. Kelchtermans, G. (in press). Teacher vulnerability. Understanding its moral and political roots. Cambridge Journal of Education.