Sun-hong’s online journal

8:55amI came to the office earlier to deliver the stuff to the Cameron, which I was supposed to do it yesterday. When Tim asked what I did last night, I told him that I watched the movie, “derail”. When he quested what the movie was about, I could not explain it clearly. This is the hardest parts for me. To elucidate something to someone……That is because I am supposed to spell it out in English, or I am not good at clarifying something to someone..I don’t know….I need to work on it……….….. 

9:45am  

I run the dozen boxes of paper from the basement. I went to the second floor to get the basement key at first. After I got the key, I came up to the third floor to bring the cart. Tim, and I went to the basement with a person who wants to pick up something the storage. While Tim helped her to search the stuffs, I loaded up dozen boxes. We got in the elevator together to the third floor. Tim pushed the cart and I drove it. He pushed it  hard, so I almost had to run backward. Roger and Micells saw us laugh, saying “Sami is running.”  

10:45am  

I am not sure whether I need to work until 11:00am or 1:00am. It was confusing on every Wednesday. I went to the basement with two people who are looking for available stuffes

Issues of studying experience (refers to chapter 2) Issues of using story to study experience Issues of relationships (refers to personal experience method, talking to learn) Issues of power (refers to talking to learn) Issues of identity (refers to talking to learn)   The narrative as a root metaphor for psychology by Theodore R.Sarbin.  

To validate the title of this essay, it is necessary to spell out its terms. For our present heuristic purposes, narrative is coterminous with story as used by ordinary speakers of English. A story is a symbolized account of actions of human beings that has a temporal dimension. The story is held together by recognizable patterns of events called plots. Central to the plot structure are human predicaments and attempted resolutions. (Other essays in this volume deal more fully with definitional problems. See especially the essays by Mancuso, Sutton-Smith, Robinson and Hawpe, and Gergen and Gergen.) (p.3)  Contextualism is reflected in the work of such scholars as C.S.Pierce, William James, John Dewey, and G.H. Mead. The root metaphor for contextualism is the historical event. Not necessarily an event in the past, the event is alive and in the present. In this sense history is an attempt to re-present events, to revive them, to breathe life into them. Pepper writes of the historic event as the event in actuality – they dynamic dramatic act. (p.6).  

The historian aims at historical truth, the novelist at narrative truth (Mink, 1978; Spence, 1982; see also essays in this volume by Wyatt, Steele, and Mishler). (p.8)  The narrative is a way of organizing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions; it is an achievement that brings together mundane facts and fantastic creations; time and place are incorporated. The narrative allows for the inclusion of actors’ reasons for their acts, as well as the causes of happening (p.9).  

The employment of the narrative metaphor to illuminate human actions is consistent with the current refiguration of social science. Geertz (1980) has identified a movement in recent times in which students of human conduct are retreating from their reliance on energy, spatial, and mechanical metaphors and embracing metaphors drawn from the humanities: drama, game playing, ritual, rhetoric, and text. (p.10).  

More than a half century ago, John Dewey (1922) remarked on the implications of adopting humanistic over scientific (mechanistic) metaphors. (p.10).              The novelist and the dramatist are so much more illuminating as well as  

         more interesting commentators on conduct than the schematizing            psychologist. The artist makes perceptible individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature evoked in new situations. In putting the case visibly and dramatically he reveals vital actualities. The scientific systematizer treats each act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical combination of elements drawn from a ready-made inventory. (pp.145-46) MacIntyer (1981) makes a strong case for considering the narrative as central to an understanding of human conduct.             In successfully identifying and understanding what someone else is doing we always move towards placing a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals concerned and of the settings in which they act and suffer. It is now becoming clear that we render the actions of others intelligible in this way because actions itself has a basically historical character. It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative in appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told – except in the case of fiction. (p.197).  

Because storytelling is commonly associated with fiction, fantasy, and pretending, some critics are skeptical about the use of the narrative as a model for thought and action. For the serious scientist, storytelling is related to immaturity and playfulness. (p.11).  Essentially, the mainstream tradition has focused almost exclusively on problems of standardization, that is , on how to ask all respondents the same question and how to analyze their responses with standardized coding systems. (p.233).  

Through this exercise, I hope to demonstrate the feasibility of treating responses as stories, suggest types of findings that result, and clarify some problematic features of narrative analysis. Among the questions discussed are the following: What forms do narratives take in respondents’ accounts and under what conditions do they appear? What do narrative mean, and what different meaings emerge from alternative narrative-analytic models and methods? How does narrative interpretation differ from interpretations based on standardized coding procedures? What are the implications for theory and for research practice, both in the conduct and analysis of interviews? (p.234).  What has been learned, I believe, is the following: first, narratives are a naturally-occurring feature of respondents’ accounts and, under some interviewing conditions, may be ubiquitous; second, a variety of methods are available for their systematic analysis; third, different methods may be particularly  appropriate to questions central to different disciplines, for example, the sociological study of normative structures of social action, anthropological study of cultural values, and psychological study of personal identity; fourth, there are general problems of interviewing and specific problems in the analysis of interview-narratives that require further investigation. (p. 248)  

 Difference between curriculum and instruction

 Clandenin and connelly talked about action research, CMC 

According to them, Eisner, Jackson, and Scwab are important figures of Neo-Dewyan scholars.

Handbook of research on curriculum / Philip W.Jackson  

Teacher as curriculum maker.   We have taught in schools and universities and devote considerable time to thinking about our teaching. We regard ourselves primarily as school people working in a university setting rather than as university observers of schools. Our sympathies tend to lie with teachers;  p.363 

We believe that research texts are different when read by researchers than they are when read by classroom teachers wit students to meet. Indeed, the comparison of research reports read as texts for further inquiry with the same reports read as texts for practice is important to an understanding of teachers as curriculum makers. P.364  

We read existing research through teachers’ eyes; We draw in a new literature of teachers’ stories and stories of teachers; and finally, we work with these stories to create a new literature of teachers as curriculum makers. P.364.  

The logic of this distinction is summarized by Popham and Baker(1970) as follows : “There are basically two kinds of decisions that the educator must make. First, he must decide what the objectives (that is , the ends ) of the instructional system should be, and seemed, he must decide on the procedures (that is, the means) for accomplishing those objectives (82). They make clear that for them the distinction between curriculum and instruction is a distinction between ends and means. P.365  

As Bussis, Chittenden, and Amarel put it, “What is extraordinary is its indifference to the reality of education” (11) and as Goodlad (1969) adds, “If the abstract categories of research and discourse…..bear no identifiable relationship to the existential phenomena called curricula, then there is , indeed, cause for concern” (369)  p.365  

In this view, ends and means are so intertwined that designing curricula for teachers to implement for instructional purposes appears unreal, somewhat as if the cart were before the horse. P.365 

Thyler maintained the distinction between curriculum as ends and instruction as means. P.366.  

Tyler’s colleague, Joseph Scawab (1960), essentially took the “curriculum misreading” of Tyler and advanced the claim that any account of curriculum, admitting there were many, entailed an account of four commonplaces, or “desiderata”; teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu. For Schwab and “neo-Schwabians,” a statement that does not contain a direct or implied reference to “teacher” is not an “adequate” (Schwab’s term) curriculum statement. Schwab, in the 1960 paper, was not arguing that the teacher was a curriculum maker, that is, that the teacher was the agent of curriculum with a set of common places; teacher agency, and many other possible roles, might be imagined. The key point for us is that bringing Tyler’s and Schwab’s ideas together provides the makings of an image of the teacher as curriculum maker. Schwab provided the rationale, which was a kind of reinterpretation of Tyler, and
Tyler provided the agency. In this view the teacher is a maker of only half a curriculum loaf, the half that often goes by the name of means. P.366 

To take the teacher seriously, as Cuban insists, is to do more than design implementation strategies to minimize teacher effects on the curriculum while working to gain their commitment to its purposes.  

Schwab (1970a, 1970b, 1971, 1973) urged researchers to move their studies out of the lab and into schools and to start writing a different kind of literature for a different kind of journal. He argued that the improvement of schools should be based on knowledge of them rather than on Tyler’s philosophical, psychological, and socially derived ends, transmitted, as Schwab (1983) put it, as messages from
Moscow. Many researchers, Cuban (1984, 1986) among them, have followed this advice; an exception, perhaps, is evident in the critical theory literature, although even here there is a tradition of school-based critical ethnography. But it is far from clear, at least to us, that doing so has provided much of an answer to the dilemma of stability and change. P.369  

Not everyone, of course, would agree that metaphor plays the significant role in experience, as suggested here. P.369  

On these grounds, the possibilities for change in our thinking about change are further beyond our current grasp than writers such as Tomkins, Cuban, Greene, Schwab, Eisner, and
Jacksons may have imagined. P.370.  

Wolcott’s (1973) view that “the real change agents of schools in modern societies are the young teachers, the young parents , and the pupils themselves” (321) is now accepted wisdom rather than idiosyncratic observation. In the research literature of the Englsih-speaking world, one consistent finding is that teachers make the difference when it comes to realizing the intentions of external developers. P.376 

Cuban’s (1976) metaphor applies; It is all rather like the squalls that disturb the surface of the sea, which underneath remains calm. P.378.   

John Dewey’s writing and the work of Dewey’s school – The laboratory school of the

University of
Chicago – constitute the core of the idea. We have chosen to elaborate on Dewey’s ideas with writings by Philip Jackson, Joseph Schwab, and Elliot Eisner. Each taught at the
University of
Chicago, and Jackson was director of the

Laboratory
School for a time;  

Narrative research : Political issues and implications by Freema elbaz- luwisch I identified a series of methodological and epistemological issues about what narrative research is , how it is conducted , what its purposes are, how narrative knowledge is validated and what the roles and responsibilities of the various participants are. .  P.75 

I wondered about who has the authority to legitimate new varieties or conceptualizations of knowledge; about how power is used and shared in interviews and other research activities; about the nature and existence of such entities as subjects and objects, and who makes the distinction between them, granting equality or supremacy to one or the other; about how new ways of understanding human nature gain legitimacy; about how the distinction between public and private is currently changing, and what the implications are for society, and for social and educational research. Finally, I thought about what makes a good story, and whose tats and standard are authorized to make this judgment. .  P.75 

Narrative research makes use of personal materials such as life story, conversation and personal writing; of necessity these invite reflection and reflexivity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Reflection brings the narrative researcher up against the edges of the work, and requires him or her to examine the context within which the research is carried out and its broader implications. .  P.75 

These matters are not necessarily political in themselves, but all of them have political aspects; in addition the conduct of narrative research in itself highlights the political because it is research ‘against the grain” within the academic world, challenging the dominance of more established modes of inquiry.  P.75 

I will consider the fact that narrative research rests heavily upon a new conceptualization of knowledge and research, a “new paradigm” : what Bruner (1986) has referred to as “narrative knowing” as distinct from “paradigmatic knowing.” Second, the fact that much narrative inquiry is conducted collaboratively will be considered. Finally, narrative knowing rests on a new understanding of subjectivity, and an attempt to redraw the distinction between public and private, and the political implications of these changes for the stud of teaching will explored. P.76 In a recent analysis, Polkinghorne (1995) distinguishes between two types of narrative research. One is “analysis of narratives,” which is research in the paradigmatic (Bruner, 1986) mode, usually qualitative, which collects and analyzes some form of a particular ethnic or occupational group, in order to arrive at generalizations about the group being studied. The second type is “narrative analysis,” which is research in the narrative mode, in which the researcher studies particular cases, either of individuals or of “bounded systems,” by collecting material, usually descriptions of events, and from them producing storied accounts which render the data meaningful. The former type of narrative research has a fairly long tradition in social science, whereas the latter is both more recent and poses a more radical challenge to accepted forms of inquiry. P.76 

In analysis of narratives, the desired outcome is generalizations about a particular phenomenon based on the narratives generated by or about that phenomenon; in narrative analysis the desired outcome is not a generalization but a narrative which renders clear the meanings inherent in or generated by a particular subject. Narrative analysis as Polkinghorne describes it will be of primary interest here, because this mode of work gives rise to more concerns of a political nature; Narrative researchers often work on a small-scale, do not aspire to generalization in the usual sense, nor do they promise immediate practical benefits; yet they make strong claims for the authenticity and power of narrative researcher. They aspire to true collaboration and to the giving of voice to participants, yet still work from within traditional academic structures which value individuality, originality and ownership of intellectual products. These paradoxical circumstances give rise to confrontation with traditional modes of research. P.76 Since Dewey (1904), the relationship between theory and practice has been much discussed by educators. I find most helpful the treatment by Mckeon (1952) who spelled out different ways of conceptualizing the connection between , in his terms, philosophy and action. P.77 

In
North America, the number of researchers doing narrative work seems to have reached a “critical mass,” and narrative researchers no lognger need to argue for the legitimacy of their methods with every new study. In smaller countries the academic community is likely to be more cautious and conservative. In
Israel, for example, narrative work is viewed with great interest, particularly among researchers who are close to the schools; nevertheless the question, “Yes, but is it research?” is still raised frequently. P.77 

One of the first, and seemingly least problematic, assumptions of narrative research, has been the idea that it was important to have an understanding of teaching from an “emic” perspective, knowledge of teaching from the inside rather than knowledge about teaching from the vantage point of an observer. P.77 Another assumption has been that, because “top-down” prescriptions have been unsuccessful in improving teaching, educational practice can only be changed from inside, by practitioners working together, often with the help of researchers. P.77 

A third assumption, which seems to build on the previous two (in an overly neat and idealized history of the development of narrative research) is that reflective teaching and school-based development, by themselves will be as unsuccessful in bringing about sustained change in educational practice as were other top-down theoretically-driven efforts. P.78 This search for a different kind of knowledge, knowledge which empowers rather than making possible prediction and control, is a significant reconceptualization of the purpose of educational research.  P.78 

It is not easy to give up power;  but narrative researchers have not given it up so much as pointed to the illusory nature of the power of traditional research. This places the narrative researcher at odds with many of his or her colleagues. The criticism that research on teachers’ knowledge amounts to a celebration of the status quo, a glorification of whatever teachers happen to be doing rather than  a search for best practice, may be, at least in part, a response to this situation. P.78  Furthermore, narrative research implies not only an alternative way of acquiring knowledge but also constitutes an alternative way of conceptualizing human nature. The idea that we live our lives as we tell our stories puts into questions many psychological formulations of human nature because it implies that personality is much more dynamic and open than many theories allow, is always  in interaction with the social and cultural stories available to us, and academic don’t know more than ordinary people do about their own stories. All of this rests on a rethinking of the role of psychology (Sarbin, 1986; Bruner, 1986) and, perhaps more importantly, requires us to redefined our understanding of the terms objectivity and subjectivity (Barone, 1992, Eisner, 1992). P.78 

True collaboration is extremely difficulty, and the status differential between teachers and university researcher (each of whom has quite different purposes and rewards for participating in research) always plays a role. Much has been written about the problems and pitfalls of collaborative research (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 1988). The development of a collaborative relationship takes time, and coming to a mutually illuminating rendition of a teacher’s story can be a long process whose outcome is uncertain. (p.79) The value of different perspectives may be appreciated in theory, but in practice it often becomes an obstacle. (p.79)  

It is understandable that we choose to work with those teachers with whom we feel there is a likelihood of developing good working relationships. Being interviewed, narrativing one’s life story and opening up one’s classroom by telling stories about one’s practice are challenging activities to take part in, and will be successful for both parties only if undertaken in an atmosphere of cooperation and trust. (p.80).  Collaborative work as  part of the everyday practice of teaching is much more difficult to carry out. Goodson (1995) points to the limitation of collaborative work on narrative which stops short: His concern is that the presentation of a life story (even if it succeeds in giving expression to the previously silenced voices of non-mainstream teachers) remains in the domain of the particular and the specific, and provides no purchase on our understanding of the structures of power and domination in schooling. He argues convincingly that stories should provide the starting point for an ongoing process of collaboration in which we jointly interrogate those structures and elaborate a “theory of context.” (p. 80).  

All who where trained never to use the first person singular in academic writing can appreciate the difficulties involved in this change; we have invested a lot of energy in making a clear distinction between our personal and professional knowledge, and in keeping our personal stories out of the picture. Further, since all of us have private lives and are equal in this respect, the focus on the personal is yet another respect, the focus on the personal is yet another respect in which academics must relinquish their power over practitioners. Finally as researchers in a field which is unsure of its statue in the academy, we risk ridicule and deligitimation in bringing personal materials into the scientific endeavour. P.81 Personally I take inspiration from a number of writers: Barone (1989) tells of his personal encounter with a “student-at-risk.” Steedman (1986) tells the story of her mother’s life, focusing on the secrets which as a child she knew about from hints and awkward silences, and using these secrets to explore the meaning of working-class life and aspirations. Doll (1995) and hooks (1994) each tell of the development of their careers in academia and of their intellectual and personal development inside, outside and against the academy. In each case the author’s personal story is integral to the matters at hand, but what is being recounted is no longer the pat, insulated account of an isolated self; Each of these authors has searched for ways to present the self-in-relation and the self-in-opposition. But they offer no formulas; how exactly to give voice to personal stories is a matter that has to be figured out “from scratch” each time. P.81  

The lives of “ordinary” people are, in this sense, just as potentially illuminating as the lives of those who have attained some form of externally defined greatness (Denzin, 1989) – a radical notion which challenges liberal views of progress and accomplishment.  P.81 What we might learn from these cases is that the stories are most instructive and revealing when they are most personal, and often when the owners of the stories are most vulnerable. As researchers, we cannot easily protect them. In fact, it is precisely in wishing to treat them as equals that we expose them to risk. There are instances in which fictionalizing could be helpful as one way of enabling these stories to be told, but this solution is both technically and methodologically difficult. (p.82)

Observation

The classrooms were located in three elementary and three high schools situated in three kinds of institutions; public, private, and parochial, all in Chicago. I visited a half dozen of the rooms quite frequently, at least a score of times and possibly more. The others I visited only occasionally, as little as five or six times each. Sometimes my visits took only a few minutes, but typically they lasted for an hour or longer. The group discussions took place at biweekly dinner meetings of the teachers and the research staff. These occurred throughout each of the school years during which the project was in operation. Informal conversations with individual teachers also occurred sporadically throughout the life of the project. Over the course of the three years, each teacher also participated in three hour-long interviews. – p.401

Classroom teachers, on the average, occupy an inferior social status in relation to researchers. That harsh fact, which many of us lament and others might prefer to ignore or deny, can be and often is a source of difficulty when tryting to establish a collaborative relationship between the two particies , particularly one that pertains to moral matters.  – p.403.

Researchers, by and large, come from universities, whereas teachers do not. The former, who are relatively few in number compared to teachers, often hold advanced degrees and employ the titles (Dr. or Professor) that go with them. They also have much greater control over their comings and goings than do teachers. Those differences alone are sufficient to make many teachers uneasy when invited to participate in a research study that involves classroom visitations and observations. These gross inequalities are by no means the only source of potential diffiuclty associated with status differences. -p.403

A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: lives in Canada by MING FANG HE

Three female chinese’s story in Canada….It reminds me of movie eum shik nam yu..

Narrative inquiry: research tool and medium for professional development

Human beings tell and listen to stories. We use narrative to communicate and understand people and events. We think and dream in narrative. Narrative has been described as a basic mode of thought (Hardy, 1968) and as a way of organizing knowledge (Bruner, 1986).  – p.50  

The major difference is related to its open-ended, experiential and quest-like qualities. Narrative inquiry retains these qualities in two areas of usefulness: research and professional development. In both areas, its use in intercultural communication has become particularly productive (Conle et al., 2000).  – p.50  

Narrative was important as process and as product (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).  

There were, of course, theoretical resources at the base of these developments. Most frequently cited in publications and read by graduate students were Dewey (1904, 1934, 1938); Polanyi (1958); Schwab (1970, 1971); MacIntyre (1981); Carr (1986); Bruner (1980), Johnson (1987); Polkinghorne (1988). Dewey’s work on time, experience and sociality was central (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), for narrative inquiry consists of experiential stories that combine the social and the personal. – p.51 

The terms ‘temporality’ and ‘historicity’ had emerged in Continential philosophy (Heidegger, 1929; Gadamer, 1960, 1979) and from 1986 onward were accessed at
OISE through Carr’s connection between narrative and phenomenology (1986).  – p.52 

With regard to narrative as method, researchers in 1990 still needed to be “prepared to follow their nose and, after the fact, reconstruct their narrative of inquiry” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p.7). “The language and criteria for the conduct of narrative inquiry were under development” and “ each inquirer had to search for, and defend, the criteria that best applied to his or her work” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p.7). –p.52 

Resonance is the process that carries the inquiry along, producing more and more stories, through metaphorical connections rather than through strictly logical ones (Conle, 1996). This process became especially useful in culturally heterogeneous settings where it could render encounters of difference particularly productive (Conle et al., 2000).  

A variety of potential criteria were proposed for narrative inquiry. It shared some of these with other qualitative research, such as, for example, plausibility, authenticity, economy, selectivity, familiarity, or narrative truth (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).  

Importantly, since this kind of work not only involves stories, but is also an inquiry into lived phenomena, it is essential that whatever sense of closure may convey the end of a narrative, it must remain open-ended and available for re-telling, by the inquirer or by others. “The narrative insights of today are the chronological events of tomorrow” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p.9).  

Narrative are about temporal events and tell us where and when something happens, in which contexts, who said what to whom, with which feelings and in what mood, and under which moral constraints. Such contextualization on the surface seems to convey facts, but it also potentially subjunctivises these ‘facts’.  – p.56  

On the other hand, it is equally crucial that narrative inquiry should not contribute to rampant relativism, especially moral relativism, and should not further the rage against reason (Bernstein, 1992) that seems to replace rampant instrumental rationality, both in the academic world and in daily life. Such relativism often seems to be the only alternative presented in intercultural settings. – p.56 

Many of these dangers are connected to what Habermas (1981) sees as three false presuppositions built into the grammar of fiction: The autonomy of actors; The independence of culture; The transparency of communication. – p.56 

All of these dangers can be avoided, if the temporal quality of narrative inquiry is kept in mind and if the dialectical relationship of the inquirer with his or her object of inquiry is not ignored. There are of course times, such as the writing of this paper, when the temporal, narrative quality of a work is very low. –p.58  

Finally, I need to address the question of rationality in narrative work. Narrative inquiry is at times described by researchers as being indistinguishable from fiction. Such a view Either leads to the dismissal of narrative inquiry as viable research or else its fictional character is praised as arts-based research. – p.58  

In a forthcoming paper I have used Habermas’s four validity claims as claims that narrative inquirers can make as well and as ways in which narrative inquirers are open to challenge. We should be able to assume that narrative inquirers claim that :  

-         they truthfully represent their feelings, intentions, etc; -         their stories are socially acceptable ; -         the contents of the narratives are true with regard to what they describe; -         the language is comprehensible.  

The emphasis here is on claim, not on ensuring that all works comply. Habermas sees these four validity claims as anchors to a rationality inherent in everyday communication (1981) and I see them as criteria that present narrative inquiry from sliding into fiction.  

–p.59