Narrative Inquiry: Genres

Many genres of narrative inquiry exist. Biography, autobiography, life story research, and oral history are currently relevant forms of narrative research. In a biography, the researcher writes and records experiences about another person's life. Autobiography presents a narrative research form that includes a person or people recording their own experiences and writing about these experiences and themselves. In a life story research study, the researcher describes an individual's entire life. For an oral history, the researcher gathers information from an individual or groups of people about an experience and the causes and effects on the individual or individuals, the community, and society at large. We will describe examples of all four genres to show how we have engaged in these different forms of narrative inquiry.

To contextualize the processes involved in every research project, we want to explain that throughout our narrative inquiry studies we simultaneously observe the surrounding environment, note actions and speech, and participate in a dialogue. The outcome of the process is reflexive knowledge, insights into our participants' world that shed light on what we know about any given topic (Hertz, 1997). As researchers seeking to engage our participants and their stories in a reflexive manner, we continually question what we know, how we know it, and our relationship to this knowledge so we can collect multiple forms of data (observations, interviews, documents) in order to answer each question as thoroughly as possible. Our research projects take shape over time, capturing the iterative rethinking and revisions of topics and of ourselves (Lincoln, 1997; Reinharz, 1997). Further, reflexivity calls the researcher to raise questions of a cultural, historical, and political nature about what influences the assumptions and expectations inherent in his or her research (Miller, 1998), and to make explicit the constructed nature of the research produced by the researcher and the participants. The following research examples exemplify the aforementioned narrative inquiry genres: biography, autobiography, life story research, and oral history.

Biography

The narrative research in which I, Roland Mitchell, am currently involved concerns biographical inquiry into the stories that educators of color construct and subsequently rely on to navigate predominantly white and black U.S. higher education settings. The understandings that are being gleaned from the study suggest that although nearly half a century of legislation and hard-won victories against segregationist-era policies has resulted in greater inclusion of people of color, the lingering and ubiquitous influences of white supremacy still pervade the campuses, the practices, and specifically the stories that are told about U.S. postsecondary education. It is therefore not simply individuals along different continuums of this hard-fought battle who enter classrooms but entire communities with competing stories of struggle, resistance, success, and failure.

A significant part of a narrative inquiry is describing the landscape in which the narrative occurs. Collecting narratives for this study from faculty members of color through such mediums as individual interviews, focus groups, and class observations afforded a complex view of this landscape. Information gathered within and among these spaces demonstrates that even in cases in which only a single member of a family or community enters these once exclusively white environments, the insight that individual has gained from the stories about an entire community's resistance profoundly influences the ways in which he or she makes meaning and subsequently relates to his or her students. Further, the research suggests that educators of color who had the greatest success at providing service to students of color in predominantly white settings were able to draw on these stories of navigating historically segregated spaces as powerful pedagogical tools.

Autobiography

As a scholar of color, I found the stories my research participants narrated as both professionals and students in predominantly black and white universities to be similar to my own story. Consequently, one of the greatest strengths of an autobiographical approach to narrative is that it builds on insights and understandings with which the author has firsthand knowledge. Hence, as a student, administrator, and professor of color in these contexts, I had specific insights about the relationships between race, racism, and education. Recognition of the influence of autobiographically informed insights is a central part of coming to terms with these stories because immediate experience can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, in some cases it provides the intricate details that are an indispensable part of communicating the complexities of an individual's experiences. On the other hand, being so close to a specific event or set of experiences (especially when considering the complexities associated with race and racism in the United States) risks causing me to potentially adopt bias that may influence the ways that he engages the stories of his participants.

My autobiographical accounts of the experiences that I had concerning race in varied educational contexts significantly informed my perspective as a researcher. For example, when considering the campus cultures of predominantly black and white universities, my understandings were informed by how I have personally observed issues associated with race and racism play out in different ways in multiple settings. For example, differences surfaced between predominantly white and predominantly black schools concerning the importance of titles (such as Doctor or Professor). This valuing of titles reflects a conservative culture in which predominantly black universities have historically functioned. The value attributed to more formal titles and a generally more conservative culture at black schools correspond to an intentional aim of presenting a more professional public image. In the postsegregation era these universities' relevance and overall value are often in question. In comparison, in predominantly white universities, in which institutional values appear to be more in line with the dominant culture, the adoption of a conservative public image is not necessarily a given.

The status or legitimacy afforded to predominantly white universities has little if anything to do with racial or racist perceptions about the competence of the educators or the educability of the student population. Their image is more closely related to their endowments, their retention rates, and the prestige of their alumni. In contrast, at historically black colleges there tends to be a more conservative institutional culture in which educators are typically referred to by their professional title, the dress by both students and staff members tends to be more formal, and “in loco parentis” approaches to student affairs translate to single-sex dorms and student curfews. Understanding these tensions on a personal level provided indispensable insight for conducting inquiry into the stories my participants told about their experiences in their classrooms and ultimately their relationships to their students and the material that they were teaching. Autobiographical approaches to narrative enable me to develop narratives that move beyond sweeping generalizations that describe predominantly black schools as rigid legalistic institutions or that portray predominantly white schools as places where academic credentials are unimportant.

Life Story Research

As previously described, research that I, Christine Lemley, completed for my doctoral dissertation (2006) included work with an indigenous people of North America. I gathered information to document their life stories of living and speaking their indigenous language. Through my studies I addressed the following question: How does language transmission between elders, teachers, and students influence the identity of the speakers and the sustainability of the language programs? I wanted to learn from people participating in the programs specifically about their identity and generally about what their thoughts were in regard to the language programs' sustainability. I learned the history of the tribe, noted how tribal members practiced their language in multiple sacred and public spaces, and engaged in dialogue with elders, teachers, and students to better understand their commitment to the language learning process.

Through the data analysis I came to understand how my initial focus on the language programs' sustainability needed to include the programs themselves as well as community events in which the participants engaged. Solely looking at the language programs would not accurately describe the Menominee Nation's commitment to language revitalization because language learning involved much more than translation and language program practice. So I altered my focus to explore my participants' lived stories of engaging in language learning as well as their actions and interactions including using sweat lodges, harvesting rice, collecting maple syrup, and attending storytelling sessions. I learned how the influence of involvement in the language programs on individual participants' identities revealed how people participating in the language programs expressed pride in their indigenous identity. The elders, teachers, and students explained how important speaking the language and practicing the culture were to them, their families, and their community. By focusing on the language programs' sustainability and listening to my participants' lived stories of learning and speaking their indigenous language, I found that Menominee language is learned both through acquisition of language knowledge and skills as well as through interactions with culture and living on the land.

I observed my research participants in multiple language learning settings and interviewed them about what learning the language meant to them personally as individuals and collectively as members in a community. I considered my position as an outsider in this community and the individual roles of elder, teacher, and student within the indigenous community, as well as the agency community members perceived within different spaces and places. Studying the participants' life story narratives led me to research Termination (1954–1973), a time when the federal government severed its previously established trust with some indigenous nations and eradicated their sovereign status, both of which had been defined in the Constitution and by federal law. These indigenous members no longer had an indigenous affiliation and became American citizens through forced assimilation and exploitation. Termination was a historical event to which the research participants repeatedly referred as threatening their indigenous identity, language, culture, and land. The life story research concerning forced attempts of assimilation revealed their obvious effect on contemporary challenges to learning and speaking the language. Talking to and against one another, the participants' narratives demonstrated the ease and tension the participants experienced in living, learning, and teaching the language.

Oral History

After I completed my dissertation work with the Menominee, I decided to explore positioning myself with “insider” status and study my own community in southwestern Wisconsin, where many people have moved from city dwellings to country living. I recalled hearing stories at family gatherings of my parents and family friends deciding to leave city life to take up rural living in the early 1970s. I invited my parents and their friends to share their stories of this move and narrate the challenges and rewards they experienced. This initial idea has continued, and I am currently involved with an oral history project focusing on lived experiences of people who moved to the Kickapoo Valley in southwestern Wisconsin from 1965 to 1985 as part of the back-to-the-land movement. I am focusing on two interview questions for this study: “What does ‘back to the land’ mean to you?” and “How did you participate (or not) in this movement?”

To understand the impact of the back-to-the-land movement on the ecological, economic, and social well-being of the Kickapoo Valley, I am completing extensive interviews about why the research participants moved and stayed (or left) and collecting artifacts (photos, journals, objects, newspaper articles, movies) that represent their lives. I am also investigating historical events that the participants mention were critical to their lives during the time they moved to and lived in the area. I completed an initial interpretation of the interviews and artifacts and now want to research the town's relocation of a flood plain, a historic event that many participants referenced as demonstrative of tensions and cooperation experienced as outsiders working with locals in the community. In addition to exploring the historic relocation, I have also decided to interview outsiders who moved to the area as well as locals who grew up in the area in order to collect multiple perspectives of this particular history and show the causes and effects of this movement on individuals, the community, and society at large. (For additional perspectives, see Chapter Five on biography and life story research, and Chapter Six on historical research.)