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Navigating Sites for Narrative Inquiry

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 Journal of Teacher Education
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Navigating Sites for Narrative Inquiry

D. Jean Clandinin, Debbie Pushor and Anne Murray Orr
Journal of Teacher Education 2007; 58; 21
DOI: 10.1177/0022487106296218

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NAVIGATING SITES FOR NARRATIVE INQUIRY

D. Jean Clandinin
University of Alberta
Debbie Pushor
University of Saskatchewan
Anne Murray Orr
St. Francis Xavier University

Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators.
However, this appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and disadvantages. Some assume narra-
tive inquiries will be easy to design, live out, and represent in storied formats in journals, disserta-
tions, or books. For the authors, though, narrative inquiry is much more than the telling of stories.
There are complexities surrounding all phases of a narrative inquiry and, in this article, the authors
pay particular attention to thinking about the design of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’
and teacher educators’ own practices. They outline three commonplaces and eight design elements for
consideration in narrative inquiry. They illustrate these elements using recently completed narrative
inquiries. In this way, the authors show the complex dimensions of narrative inquiry, a kind of
inquiry that requires particular kinds of wakefulness.

Keywords: commonplaces of narrative inquiry; ethics; narrative inquiry; representation;

research design; research methodology; research methods; teacher education

Narrative inquiry is a methodology that fre-
quently appeals to teachers and teacher educa-
tors. Part of the appeal is, no doubt, the comfort
that comes from thinking about telling and lis-
tening to stories. This comfort associated with
narratives and stories carries into a sense of
comfort with research that attends to teachers’
and teacher educators’ stories. However, this
appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and
disadvantages. Although it has appeal, some
immediately see it as an “easy” kind of research
and assume that narrative inquiries will be easy
to design, live out, and represent in a storied for-
mat in journals, dissertations, or books. Some
see narrative inquiry as “just telling stories.” For
us, and for many others (Clandinin et al., 2006;
Craig, 1992; Olson, 1993; Paokong & Rosiek,
2003; Polkinghorne, 1988), narrative inquiry is
much more than the telling of stories. The edi-
tors of many journals, including the Journal
of Teacher Education, are concerned with making
more apparent the complexities surrounding all
phases of a narrative inquiry; in this article, we
take on the challenge of paying particular atten-
tion to thinking about the quality and impact of
narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’ and
teacher educators’ own practices. Although we
want to encourage people to engage in narrative
inquiries into their own practices, we do want to
show the complex dimensions of such research,
for narrative inquiry is a kind of inquiry that
requires particular kinds of wakefulness.

Authors’ Note: We would like to acknowledge the reviewer’s (albeit anonymous) contribution to deepening and enrich-
ing this conversation.
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007 21-35
DOI: 10.1177/0022487106296218
© 2007 by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

21
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 The term narrative inquiry was first used in
the educational research field by Connelly and
Clandinin (1990) in an article published in
Educational Researcher. Their conceptualization
of narrative inquiry arises from a Deweyan
(1938) notion that life is education. Their inter-
est, then, is in “lived experience—that is, in lives
and how they are lived” (Clandinin & Connelly,
2000, p. xxii). Although narrative inquiry “has a
long intellectual history both in and out of edu-
cation” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2), prior
to 1990 it had been thought about in ways such
as MacIntyre’s (1981) notion of narrative unity,
Mitchell’s (1981) comprehensive presentation of
the field of narratology, Polkinghorne’s (1988)
understanding of narrative analysis, and Coles’s
(1989) literary ideas of narrative. By building
from these notions, yet situating their conceptu-
alization as narrative and inquiry, as phenome-
non and method, Connelly and Clandinin
(1990) established the educational importance of
narrative inquiry as a research methodology
that brings “theoretical ideas about the nature of
human life as lived to bear on educational expe-
rience as lived” (p. 3).
As a way to begin to explore the complexities
of narrative inquiry as research methodology, we
first offer a definition of narrative inquiry
and outline three commonplaces of narrative
inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). We then
briefly describe two narrative inquiries under-
taken by Murray Orr (2005) and Pushor (2001).
Both are teacher educators, and their narrative
inquiries emerge from, and influence, their
teacher education practices. We then elaborate
eight key elements that may be useful in thinking
about conducting and representing narrative
inquiries. Pushor’s and Murray Orr’s studies are
used to illuminate each of the eight elements.
A DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE INQUIRY
Although there are many ideas about what
researchers and practitioners mean when they
use the term narrative inquiry, we use the defin-
ition offered by Connelly and Clandinin (2006).
They wrote,
Arguments for the development and use of narrative
inquiry come out of a view of human experience in
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which humans, individually and socially, lead sto-
ried lives. 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.
Viewed this way, narrative is the phenomenon stud-
ied in inquiry. Narrative inquiry, the study of experi-
ence 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 par-
ticular narrative view of experience as phenomena
under study. (p. 477)
Although narrative inquiry has been used in
studies of community (Huber & Whelan, 2001),
nursing (Barton, 2006), anthropology (Bateson,
1994), occupational therapy (Mattingly, 2006),
cross-cultural studies (Andrews, 2006) and many
others, our interest in narrative inquiry in this
article is in how it has been taken up and used
by teachers and teacher educators interested in
studying and improving their own practices.
The field of narrative inquiry is still develop-
ing. The Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a
Methodology (Clandinin, 2006) offers a useful
guide to methodological undertakings and lays
out helpful distinctions within the field of narra-
tive inquiry. Although “narrative inquiry shares
features in common with other forms of qualita-
tive inquiry such as the emphasis on the social in
ethnography and the use of story in phenome-
nology” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 479), it
is distinct from other methodologies. Connelly
and Clandinin borrowed the notion of common-
places from Schwab’s (1978) writing on curricu-
lum to sort through and clarify the distinct
qualities of narrative inquiry. Schwab developed
four commonplaces—teacher, learner, subject
matter, and milieu—to deal with the complexity
of curriculum. An adequate curriculum argu-
ment needed to deal with all four. What,
Connelly and Clandinin wondered, would the
commonplaces of narrative inquiry be?
THE COMMONPLACES OF
NARRATIVE INQUIRY
In a similar spirit to the one they imagined
Schwab had in developing the commonplaces
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007
of curriculum, Connelly and Clandinin (2006)
identified “three commonplaces of narrative
inquiry—temporality, sociality, and place—
which specify dimensions of an inquiry space”
(p. 479). They imagined them “in the spirit of
check points” (p. 479) or places to direct one’s
attention in conducting a narrative inquiry.
They provide a kind of conceptual framework
for narrative inquiry. However, “just as it was
for Schwab in curriculum, the study of any one
or a combination of these three commonplaces
might well take place in some other form of
qualitative inquiry” (Connelly & Clandinin,
2006, p. 479). To undertake a narrative inquiry,
there needs to be a “simultaneous exploration
of all three commonplaces” (p. 479). We cannot
focus only on one to the exclusion of others.
Commonplace One: Temporality
“Events under study are in temporal transi-
tion” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 479), that
is, events and people always have a past, pre-
sent, and a future. In narrative inquiry it is
important to always try to understand people,
places, and events as in process, as always in
transition.
Commonplace Two: Sociality
“Narrative inquirers are concerned with per-
sonal conditions and, at the same time, with
social conditions. By personal conditions we
mean the feelings, hopes, desires, aesthetic
reactions, and moral dispositions” (Connelly &
Clandinin, 2006, p. 480) of the inquirer and
study participants. By social conditions they
draw attention to the existential conditions, the
environment, surrounding factors and forces,
people and otherwise, that form each individ-
ual’s context.
Connelly and Clandinin (2006) specified
another dimension of the sociality common-
place as the relationship between participant
and inquirer. This is less important when one is
focused on one’s own practices as a teacher
educator or teacher; however, it is very impor-
tant in narrative inquiries where there are par-
ticipants. In these cases “inquirers are always
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in an inquiry relationship with participants’
lives. We cannot subtract ourselves from rela-
tionship” (p. 480).
Commonplace Three: Place
Again drawing on Connelly and Clandinin
(2006), by place we mean “the specific concrete,
physical and topological boundaries of place
or sequence of places where the inquiry and
events take place” (p. 480). As they noted, the
key to this commonplace is recognizing that
“all events take place some place” (p. 481). In
narrative inquiry, “the specificity of location is
crucial. . . . Place may change as the inquiry
delves into temporality” (p. 480) and a narra-
tive inquirer needs to think through the impact
of each place on the experience.
A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF TWO
NARRATIVE INQUIRIES
In this section we briefly describe two narra-
tive inquiries, one conducted by Murray Orr
and a second by Pushor. Both inquiries are part
of a program of research into children’s,
teachers’, parents’, and administrators’ lives as
they are composed and lived out on school
knowledge landscapes. They are shaped by the
particular narratives of experience of each
researcher, the research puzzles, research con-
texts, lives of research participants and their
own lives, and the field texts and research texts
that come out of, and constitute, each study.
We briefly describe the studies here and revisit
them in more detail later in the article.
Murray Orr was a teacher in northern
Canadian Aboriginal schools prior to beginning
her research work. She brought questions about
what it meant to teach children in ethically
responsive and responsible ways to her research
and to her imagined life as a teacher educator.
Her doctoral research (Murray Orr, 2005) took up
these questions in a 2-year classroom-based nar-
rative inquiry into the experiences of four first-
and second-grade children who participated in a
series of book conversations with her. The four
children, students at a multicultural urban ele-
mentary school in western Canada, gathered at
23
lunchtime on Thursdays and with other students
at other times during the school day. Through
talk around children’s literature Murray Orr read
aloud, and through other conversations these
children showed ways they were coming to
understand themselves as students, siblings,
sons and daughters, and friends. The children’s
perspectives on themselves were sometimes in
tension with the stories being told of them as
students in school. Stories of each of the four
children challenged, unsettled, encouraged, and
inspired Murray Orr as she began to compose
stories to live by (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) as
a new teacher educator. She laid stories of her
knowing of each of these children alongside
her experiences in the first years of her work in
teacher education, seeing resonances as some of
the tensions experienced by preservice teachers
called to mind tensions in the lives of the
children. Her narrative inquiry helped her theo-
rize teacher education as a space to continue the
conversation, to engage preservice teachers in
inquiries, to keep at the work of composing shift-
ing stories to live by.
Pushor’s wonders from her work as a teacher,
principal, and supervisor also shaped her doc-
toral research puzzle. However, it was the dispo-
sitioning she experienced from her vantage point
of parent that framed her research puzzle and
eventually framed her interest in how parents
were seen within teacher education. For her year-
long narrative inquiry into parents’ positioning
in relation to the landscape of schools (Pushor,
2001), Pushor joined Gardenview School, a large
western Canadian suburban elementary school.
As a participant observer, she became part of
school life as a staff member, parent, and narra-
tive inquirer. As she heard stories of multiple par-
ticipants, lived and told from multiple vantage
points on the school landscape, she attended to
parents’ experiences, particularly to their experi-
ences of the structure of schooling. In this way,
she developed a metaphor of a protectorate to con-
ceptualize how educators, as holders of profes-
sional knowledge about teaching and learning,
assumed ownership of the ground of school,
establishing programs, policies, and procedures
in the interests of children and their families.
Pushor made problematic educators’ tendencies
to “see things small [by] look[ing] at schooling
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through the lenses of a system” (Greene, 1995,
p. 11). As she listened to stories of parents’ expe-
riences, she imagined how the positioning of
parents might be shifted or the landscape of
schools changed if educators also “[saw] things
big, bring[ing] [them] in close contact with details
and particularities” (p. 10). What would the
landscape of schools be like if details and partic-
ularities of children’s and parents’ lives became
focal points in the development and living out
of programs, policies, and procedures and if
children and parents had voice and place in such
decision making? In her work as teacher educa-
tor her stories and the stories of Gardenview
parents continued to trouble her practices as she
sought ways to help preservice teachers imagine
changed landscapes in which parents’ know-
ledge was also valued. As a teacher educator, she
brought forward stories from her inquiry to theo-
rize new ways of imagining school landscapes
and of helping preservice teachers imagine who
they might be in relation to parents on those
landscapes.
A FRAMEWORK OF ELEMENTS FOR
DESIGNING, LIVING OUT, AND
REPRESENTING NARRATIVE INQUIRIES
In what follows we propose a list of elements
to consider in designing a narrative inquiry, in
living in the field and composing field texts,
and in interpreting and writing research texts
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). We think about
these elements as a set of questions to ask our-
selves at each phase of a narrative inquiry. These
elements guide the conversations Connelly and
Clandinin engage in with their master’s and
doctoral students as they work through their
inquiries. However, they also work well as we
think about how we might undertake, live
through, and write about our narrative inquiries
in research texts. As we work through the ele-
ments, it is important to remember the com-
monplaces and how they shape each response.
1. A central element in narrative inquiry, as in
other forms of inquiry, is the justification, the
reasons why the study is important. Narrative
inquirers need to attend to three kinds of justifi-
cation: the personal, the practical, and the social.
The personal justification comes from the
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007
importance, in narrative inquiries, of situating
yourself in the study. We do that by writing
something we call narrative beginnings that
speak to the researcher’s relationship to, and
interest in, the inquiry. Sometimes narrative
inquirers write only a personal justification.
Although this justification is important, we also
need to justify the research practically, that is,
how will it be insightful to changing or thinking
differently about the researcher’s own and oth-
ers’ practices? The third justification requires a
researcher to think about the larger social and
educational issues the study might address. In
some ways the practical and social justifications
point researchers toward an inquiry’s end point,
that is, to being able to answer the “So what?”
and “Who cares?” questions.
Pushor’s and Murray Orr’s personal justifi-
cations differed. Whereas Pushor came to her
inquiry as a result of her positioning as parent,
Murray Orr came to hers positioned as teacher.
Prior to beginning her narrative inquiry, Pushor’s
knowledge did not prepare her for her experi-
ence as a parent on her eldest son, Cohen’s, first
day of school. As Pushor told stories of her expe-
riences as a parent, struggled to make sense of the
emotions they evoked in her, came to see how
much the familiar school landscape became for-
eign to her when she was positioned as a parent,
her personal relationship to, and interest in, her
narrative inquiry were shaped.
Murray Orr wrote of experiences in her own
schooling and in the schools and classrooms
where she was a teacher, experiences in which
children seemed to be positioned narrowly as
good students, poor students, or perhaps
students who resisted instruction. Her lived sto-
ries provided a desire to create spaces in which
children could tell diverse stories to live by other
than ones shaped by narrow plotlines as
students. As a teacher educator, Murray Orr
found further justification as she visited the class-
rooms of preservice teachers and caught fleeting
glimpses of such spaces, rarely sustained.
Just as the personal justifications for Pushor’s
and Murray Orr’s narrative inquiries differed,
so too did their practical justifications. Pushor’s
practical justification arose out of the telling and
retelling of her parent stories. As other parents
responded to her stories, she recognized these
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were not only her stories. As she received
responses from her teacher and principal col-
leagues, Pushor awoke to the practical justifica-
tion of her narrative inquiry—of how the
inquiry may be insightful in changing or caus-
ing a shift in not only her practice but also in
other educators’ practices. As a teacher educa-
tor, Pushor considered how there is often little
space in teacher education for attending to rela-
tionships with parents.
For Murray Orr, although she intended in her
master’s research to focus on facilitating critical
and creative thinking through conversation
around children’s literature (2002), she found
the books often provided openings for conver-
sational spaces with children that encouraged
tellings and retellings of their stories to live by.
Students seemed to use these book conversa-
tions as spaces to negotiate their identities. As a
beginning teacher educator, Murray Orr recog-
nized children’s literature might also provide
such spaces for preservice teachers. Her practi-
cal justification, then, arose from her eagerness
to explore the possibilities book conversations
might provide in creating transformative spaces
for students and for her.
The social justification for Pushor’s and
Murray Orr’s narrative inquiries arose out of
questions not being explored in other research
studies, questions that moved to considerations of
“So what?” and “Who cares?” within teacher edu-
cation. For Pushor, it was in the consideration of
how her parent stories were awakening her and
other educators to parents’ lack of place and voice
on school landscapes that the social justification
emerged. For Murray Orr’s inquiry, the social jus-
tification arose out of her attention to how the cul-
tural, social, and institutional narratives in which
children, teacher, and she, as researcher, were
embedded shaped their identities.
2. A second element is the need to name the
phenomenon, the “what” we are inquiring into.
Partly the phenomenon becomes clear as the
research puzzle and personal justification are
developed. An added complexity in narrative
inquiry, however, is that, no matter what the phe-
nomenon, a narrative inquirer always adopts a
narrative view of the phenomenon.
Through living, telling, and retelling their
stories, Murray Orr and Pushor began to think
25
narratively about their phenomena—a narrative
view extended over time, shaped by personal
and social conditions, and situated, correspond-
ingly, in a multiplicity of places. In the following
edited excerpt from her dissertation, Murray
Orr (2005) wrote about a child, Calvin, who
resisted her best efforts to teach him, in a story
that caused her to puzzle over how students are
positioned in schools, and how difficult it is to
shift these positionings when they are in place.
The late afternoon sun glinted on the wings of the
small plane that brought me to the tiny aboriginal
community of Willow Lake, in northern Canada,
accessible only by plane or by ice road for a brief
period in the winter. As I disembarked with my
husband, Jeff, I looked around at the children who
had come to the airstrip to see the new teachers.
Smiling faces, friendly welcoming words, helpful
hands carried some of our luggage the short dis-
tance to the teacherage, a house provided for
teachers by the federal Department of Indian and
Northern Affairs. I was a first year teacher, far from
home, beginning a new chapter of my life.
A little boy named Calvin walked hesitantly into
my Grade 2 classroom a few days after school
started. He looked too small to be there, but his
name was on my register. He wore a faded, not very
clean plaid shirt with the buttons done up wrong,
and a pair of very worn little jeans. Calvin’s long hair
wreathed his head in tangled disarray, framing a
small, sombre face from which big shining eyes
gazed up at me as I smiled and introduced myself.
Calvin did not say anything as I led him to the seat
in the middle row of the classroom which I had
assigned to him. As we continued the math lesson,
Calvin sat, stiff and silent, staring out the window.
Calvin continued to arrive at school at unpre-
dictable times over the next few weeks. He would
come in and sit quietly, not participating in class at
all. I soon discovered from the other children that
Calvin lived on the edge of town in a tiny house with
his grandfather, and that he was behind his class-
mates in school. While fluent in Dene, his first lan-
guage and the language of the community, Calvin
did not speak much English at all. And English was,
of course, the language of instruction in schools,
something I did not question at that time. I tried to
involve Calvin in class activities, to have him take
part in the lessons that I worked so hard to prepare.
He remained silent and uninvolved. I placed simple
worksheets that I thought he could complete on his
desk, so that he could work on these while the rest of
the class was busily engaged at centres or in other
activities. He left them untouched. I spoke kindly to
Calvin, encouraging him to complete at least one
26
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worksheet. He would occasionally take a pencil and
scribble on the page. I was unaware of how inade-
quate and inappropriate my actions were.
One day in early October, Calvin sat at his desk as
usual, silently staring out the window. It was nearly
lunchtime and I approached his desk, quietly asking
him to do just a little work before the bell rang. He
suddenly erupted out of his desk, yelling in Dene,
and ran to the back of the classroom, where he began
beating on the wall in unrestrained fury. I ran to the
back and tried to calm him, speaking my English
words that I hoped were soothing. This seemed to
make things worse, and Calvin began to cry, great,
hoarse sobs tearing from his throat. I reached for
Calvin to try to comfort him. He twisted away from
me and tore from the classroom. He did not return
during that school year.
Sometimes I would see him in his yard, as Jeff and
I went for walks around the community that fall and
winter. I would smile and wave; Calvin would gaze
at me with those solemn eyes, unsmiling and silent.
I wondered what had gone wrong. Why hadn’t
things worked out for Calvin in my class?
Fifteen years later, I consider why this story of
Calvin is with me after such a long time. I still clearly
see his face and picture the day he left my classroom.
I lived in northern Canada for eight years after that
fall and gradually learned something of life in a Dene
community, about the context from which Calvin
came to school. When winter arrived and the lakes
were frozen, some of the Dene families, Calvin’s
included, left the small community on the southeast-
ern side of the large lake and travelled by snowmo-
bile or sometimes dogsled to their trapline cabins to
the north. The teachers of our school took turns
weekly going up to the trapline to visit and teach. On
the trapline, families lived in small cabins and
trapped and hunted, as the Dene had done for count-
less years in this area. There were clusters of two or
three cabins on the edges of each lake scattered
throughout the region, just south of the tree line. The
children found it funny to see us out of our usual
school context, and families were unfailingly wel-
coming. My friends in the community and the
children I knew talked about feeling happier and at
home when they were up on the trapline. There was
usually enough food and always work to do, as the
caribou and smaller animals were used in a wide
variety of ways. Calvin came to school from a home
life that prepared him well for trapping, hunting,
mending a snowmobile, living on the land with inde-
pendence and ingenuity. What happened when
Calvin came to school from this story of a life lived on
the land? His story bumped up against the story of
school that I knew, as a beginning teacher who was
unaware of many things, such as the importance of
the cultural experiences of the children in my class. In
time, I gradually began to learn to welcome and
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007
 attend to those experiences more fully, although I am
surely still learning. I continue to ponder the many
possible readings of this story of Calvin. (pp. 1-4, 5)
As this excerpt illustrates, in telling and retel-
ling this story—and others—from several per-
spectives, Murray Orr framed her phenomenon
narratively as how students tell and retell their
stories to live by within the context of their
positioning on school landscapes. This narrative
view of the phenomenon of identity making
allowed her to attend to people, places, and
events as in process. As a teacher educator,
Murray Orr’s inquiry into this phenomenon
continues to shape her practice, as she sees the
importance of awakening teachers to children’s
composing of their stories to live by in school.
For Pushor, it was out of telling and retelling
stories of her experiences of her son’s entry into
the school system that she began to develop a
narrative view of her inquiry phenomenon. In
telling her stories, in listening to stories told to
her in response, and in listening to how others
made sense of her experiences, Pushor moved
backward and forward in time, inward and out-
ward between the personal and social, and to
the place of many school landscapes. In this
way, she came to understand her phenomenon
narratively and to name it as “the positioning of
parents in relation to school landscapes.” Just as
Murray Orr’s inquiry into her phenomenon
continues to shape her practice as a teacher edu-
cator, so too does Pushor’s. As attention to
parents’ voice and place on school landscapes is
virtually absent in teacher education programs,
Pushor’s attention to the positioning of parents
is woven through the curriculum of her courses.
3. A third element is to consider and to
describe the particular methods used to study the
phenomenon. Narrative inquirers address this in
two ways. First, we engage in imaginatively
thinking about the chosen puzzle, “along with
possible participants, as existing in an ever shift-
ing space” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 481).
A first task, then, for narrative inquirers is to
think of their inquiry phenomenon, topic,
puzzle, and participants as occurring in a
“multidimensioned, ever changing life space.
To plan a narrative inquiry is to plan to be self
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consciously aware of everything happening
within that life space” (p. 481). Second, think-
ing about method also means figuring out and
describing the kind of field texts (narrative
inquirers’ term for data) we need to collect and
compose. Thinking at the outset of the inquiry
about the collection and composition of field
texts needed helps us make decisions at each
phase. However, again, these decisions need to
be undertaken with care to how the kinds of
field texts are attentive to all three common-
places, that is, temporality, sociality, and place.
Taking the importance of imaginatively think-
ing about her study and how it might unfold
in the “multidimensioned, ever changing life
space” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 481) of
the classroom and school within which she was
tentatively negotiating a place for herself,
Murray Orr thought first about ways to come
alongside and cultivate relationships with the
teacher and students in the classroom. She imag-
ined facilitating a lunchtime book club with six
girls as participants. However, as she moved into
the classroom, she realized what she imagined
would need to shift as she learned more about
the teacher’s stories to live by and met the
children. The number, gender, and age of her
participants shifted from her first imagined
group. The study unfolded through imagining,
and reimagining, a reflexive and reflective back
and forthing as lives changed and the context
changed as Murray Orr moved into the midst
and came to know her participants.
Pushor also engaged in imaginative thinking
about her inquiry using Clandinin and Connelly’s
(1998b) metaphor of a parade as a way to concep-
tualize the ever-shifting life space of a school’s
professional knowledge landscape. They wrote:
Each participant in the landscape, in the parade,
has a particular place and a particular set of stories
being lived out at any particular time. Our influ-
ence in the landscape, in the parade, is uncertain.
We cannot easily anticipate how our presence, our
innovations, our stories, will influence other sto-
ries. The parade proceeds whether we wish it to or
not. (p. 161)
At first Pushor imagined herself as joining in
Gardenview School’s parade, following their
27
route, attending to temporality, sociality, and
place as she walked alongside school partici-
pants. In this way she realized what field texts
she would need. By listening to participants’ sto-
ries, by telling her own, and by interconnecting
these stories, she would come to know the nar-
rative map of their parade. In her imagined plan-
ning she recognized her presence in the parade,
having her life touch others’ lives, would shift
the parade in known and as yet unknown ways.
As she began to live out her narrative inquiry,
she attended to how the multiplicity of her stories
to live by as mother, daughter, teacher, principal,
and so on was layered with another multiplicity
around her positioning or vantage points on the
school landscape. As she lived out the study she
attended to how these multiple vantage points
shifted, sometimes within a single conversation
or event. She realized she needed to compose
intensive field notes, wakeful to who she was,
and who others saw her as, within each conver-
sation or event. These field notes became an
important part of her field texts, field texts
shaped by her multiple vantage points. As a
staff “member,” Pushor participated in activi-
ties such as staff meetings and staffroom life.
As a “member” of the parent community, she
attended, for example, school council meetings,
hot lunch days, and had coffee with parents. Her
field texts included field notes on all of this; how-
ever, she also jotted down things she was
reminded of from her own experience, as well as
readings and things for further reflection. Her
field texts included field notes; staff, parent, and
school correspondence; monthly school and
classroom newsletters; minutes of meetings; pho-
tographs of the school, people, and events; per-
sonal correspondence; and transcripts of taped
conversations.
Murray Orr’s field texts were collected and
composed when she was positioned alongside
the children in the classroom and school. She
made minimal notes in the moment, and later, at
home on her computer, she wrote of the day’s
events in as much detail as she could recall. She
also had audiotaped conversations with the
children around the books they read and taped
weekly conversations with the teacher as they
discussed the students’ curricular experiences.
She collected documents such as children’s art
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and writing and biweekly letters from the
teacher to parents. Murray Orr composed and
collected these field texts attentive to temporal-
ity, sociality, and place.
4. A fourth design element to be described in
research texts is the analysis and interpretation
processes. Although there are many ways to
think about the move from field texts to research
texts, that is, the papers, books, dissertations to
be made public, all forms of narrative inquiry
emphasize that considering the contextual and
relational are important. This element draws
attention to the importance of “defining and
balancing the commonplaces” (Connelly &
Clandinin, 2006, p. 482), that is, to how we exam-
ine, describe, and specify the commonplace fea-
tures built into the study.
Pushor and Murray Orr found the narrative
inquiry commonplaces an important scaffold
for analysis and interpretation in their inquiries.
Through attending to these commonplaces, a
move for Pushor to unanticipated times, places,
and spaces was evoked during analysis and
interpretation processes. For example, during
her year-long inquiry at Gardenview School,
parent advocacy for increased funding of public
education became a strong local movement. In
wondering if the role of advocacy was a change
in the positioning of parents, and if parents were
finding a place for their knowledge, voice, and
participation in decision making in this advo-
cacy campaign, Pushor moved backward and
forward in time, inward and outward in relation
to the personal and the social, and explored the
place of Gardenview in relation to the local and
provincial landscape. In this way, Pushor used a
process of analysis that drew deeply on the nar-
rative inquiry commonplaces as a framework
for her interpretation of her field texts.
The move from field texts to research texts
was not a smooth linear transition for Murray
Orr. She began to write pieces drawing on field
notes and transcripts only 8 months into her
research. However, she also continued to return
to the school to compose more field texts dur-
ing the next year. This overlapping of different
kinds of writing helped Murray Orr see the
commonplaces from multiple perspectives. As a
teacher educator, she saw the need for an inter-
pretation of the field texts that brought forward
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007
the importance of the relational in her conver-
sations with children. Murray Orr described her
use of the commonplaces to structure the analy-
sis in her research text and returned to the com-
monplaces throughout her research text, making
her use of this framework visible to the reader.
5. A fifth element is the positioning narrative
inquirers do as they position their studies in rela-
tion to other research on a particular phenome-
non, to related programs of research, and to
research undertaken using different epistemolog-
ical and ontological assumptions. This position-
ing is similar to what all researchers do in their
literature reviews. Sometimes, however, narra-
tive inquirers act as if there is no need for posi-
tioning their work relative to other research.
Pushor and Murray Orr read in areas specific
to their inquiry puzzles. The conceptualization
of involvement, and the lack of challenge to this
conceptualization, troubled Pushor when she
read in the literature of parent involvement.
Needing another literature to help her think
about transforming school landscapes, she
turned to the research on teacher knowledge.
Murray Orr used Greene’s conception of
“seeing big and seeing small” as a literature that
helped her consider how to create spaces in her
teacher education courses where attention to the
particularities of each person would enable pre-
service teachers to bring in their stories to live
by and, correspondingly, be awake to inviting
children to do the same. Similarly, Greene’s
(1995) conception helped Pushor imagine pay-
ing particular attention to parents on school
landscapes and to awaken preservice teachers to
seeing parents “big.”
A second way of positioning is to see that,
for example, there are multiple programs of
research within each area. It is important for nar-
rative inquirers to position their work in relation
to other programs of research. Conceptually,
Pushor and Murray Orr ground their narrative
inquiries in a Deweyan view of experience, a
view that acknowledges the embodiment of the
person in the world and that focuses on not only
the individual’s experience but also on the social,
cultural, and institutional narratives in which
the individual’s experiences are constituted,
shaped, expressed, and enacted.
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In relation to multiple programs of research
within an area, Pushor positioned her inquiry
into parent knowledge within a large body of
literature on parents, and alongside the work
of other researchers who consider how parents
participate or are engaged on school land-
scapes in ways that are relational and recipro-
cal (Benson, 1999; Cairney & Munsie, 1992;
Edwards, Pleasants, & Franklin, 1999; Shockley,
Michalove, & Allen, 1995; Taylor, 1997; Taylor &
Dorsey-Gaines, 1988). Her research grows out of
a narrative view of experiential knowledge, par-
ticularly the work on teachers’ personal practical
knowledge (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1983;
Grimmett & McKinnon, 1992). Her study high-
lights that parents too can be seen as holders and
constructors of knowledge about children, teach-
ing, and learning.
Murray Orr’s research is also positioned
within a narrative view of experiential knowl-
edge. However, she is also trying to understand
the interconnections between children’s identity
making and their contexts. Because children’s
experience with literature is an intense research
focus, she drew on others’ work in this field (Blair
& Sanford, 2004; Galda, 1998). Furthermore,
because her research interest is as a teacher
educator, she also positioned her work along-
side the literature on dilemmas in teacher
education (Britzman, 1986; Florio-Ruane, 2001;
Hinchman & Oyler, 2000). She did this by con-
necting threads from stories in her research to
the literature. For example, she connected the
children’s stories of strong family and cultural
ties with the knowing that preservice teachers
bring to the teacher education program
(Battiste, 1998; Hinchman & Oyler, 2000;
Pushor & Murphy, 2004).
A third positioning is to position our narrative
inquiries in relation to other forms of inquiry.
Clandinin and Rosiek (2006) offered a mapping
of the methodological landscape in which they
explore the conceptual roots of narrative inquiry
alongside the philosophical assumptions that
underlie other forms of scholarship. The borders
and borderlands among narrative inquiry, post-
positivist, poststructuralist, and critical theory
forms of research are mapped. This positioning is
important for narrative inquirers even if they do
29
not want to explore the philosophical assump-
tions in great detail.
These multiple ways of positioning our
work in relation to other work are all impor-
tant. The answer to which literatures we posi-
tion our work in relation to is given by noting
what conversations we most want to join
within the larger conversations of teaching and
teacher education.
6. A sixth design element, the uniqueness of
each study, allows narrative inquirers to offer
some sense of what it is that can be known about
a phenomenon that could not be known, at least
in the same way, by other theories, methods, or
lines of work.
Pushor’s and Murray Orr’s studies offer dis-
tinctive lenses through which they inquire into
their respective phenomena. For Pushor, this
uniqueness involved a different way of concep-
tualizing and representing parent knowledge. In
much of the research literature around parents,
research is conceptualized as research on parents
rather than research with parents. Research thus
presents researchers’ stories of parents, rather
than parents’ stories. In Pushor’s narrative
inquiry, parents’ voices are heard telling stories of
their experiences with their children’s schooling,
and their stories are laid alongside the stories of
educators. This multiplicity of narratives invites a
broader and more representative understanding
of the complexity of school landscapes and of the
positioning of parents on those landscapes. This
narrative way of looking at parent knowledge
offers different viewpoints often not heard in
school communities.
Murray Orr’s inquiry used a unique per-
spective on book conversations with children.
The literacy instruction research around
student talk about books in the classroom
tends to focus on goals such as improvement of
comprehension (Miller, 2002) and creating
more motivated readers (Fountas & Pinnell,
2001). Although these are important aims,
Murray Orr’s narrative inquiry, coming along-
side four children in book conversations,
enabled her to understand their composing
and recomposing of their stories to live by. By
focusing narratively on the children’s stories as
they told and retold them, Murray Orr was
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able to propose ways children used the books
to shift their stories to live by and to invite
readers of her research text to consider book
conversations as spaces where children may
engage in the work of identity making. Thus,
her narrative inquiry provided a unique con-
ceptualization of book conversations.
7. Ethical considerations, a seventh element,
are central in narrative inquiries. Although ethi-
cal review is mandatory for all research with
human participants the relational ethics of nar-
rative inquiry need special consideration.
In narrative inquiry, inquirers must deepen the sense
of what it means to live in relation in an ethical
way. . . . Ethical considerations permeate narrative
inquiries from start to finish: at the outset as ends-in-
view are imagined; as inquirer-participant relation-
ships unfold, and as participants are represented in
research texts. (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 483)
Although Pushor was no longer engaged regu-
larly at her inquiry site when she wrote her
research text, and Murray Orr was returning
only every few months to hers, their participants
continued to “live” with them as they read and
reread field texts and wrote of their research
experiences. Each story they chose to tell, or
chose not to tell, each word they selected for the
retelling, or rejected for the retelling, they did
in their participants’ imagined presence. Pushor
and Murray Orr considered how participants
might read their words, how vulnerable they
were making them, and how their way of seeing
a story might align with, or differ from, their par-
ticipants. Pushor and Murray Orr came to know
and care deeply for each individual engaged in
their narrative inquiries. Relationships devel-
oped, trust formed, experiences were shared,
stories were told, the ways lives became con-
nected with one another evoked an “ethic of
care” (Noddings, 1992) well beyond the ethical
considerations called for in formal processes and
in signed commitments to protect participants
from harm.
Pushor negotiated her research texts with her
participants to ensure she re-presented their
voices and stories in resonant ways. In these
negotiations, she received responses that were
sometimes affirming and sometimes disrupting.
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007
These became occasions for further thought, for
sustaining and extending their conversations
with one another, and prolonging her interac-
tion with the text as she revisited, rethought,
and sometimes rewrote research texts.
In working as a narrative inquirer with young
children, Murray Orr was deeply concerned
about how her relationships with the children
would affect their lives. As she saw one child
being storied by the school as learning disabled,
and watched the accompanying changes this
brought to his life, she was seeing his strengths
as an imaginative child with a rich, diverse fund
of general knowledge about historical and sci-
entific topics. Wanting to support this child, she
talked with teachers about his strengths.
Now as teacher educators, the ethical consid-
erations that permeated their narrative inquiries
have become points of conversation in their
teacher education classes. Making the affirma-
tions and disruptions that occurred when she
sought response to her research texts visible to
preservice teachers, telling the hard stories and
smooth stories around parents’ positioning in
relation to school landscapes, and troubling her
own thinking, are ways Pushor re-presents mul-
tiple voices in her teacher education curriculum
around parents and lives out the complexity of
the work in ethical ways with her preservice
teacher colleagues. As Murray Orr shares her
understanding of the child storied as learning
disabled, she wonders aloud with preservice
teachers, “Did I do enough to support this child?
Should I have done more?” She poses a larger
question, one that permeates her entire teacher
education curriculum, “In schools and class-
rooms, how do we live ethically, relationally,
responsively alongside our students and our
colleagues?”1
8. For those engaged in narrative inquiries,
the process of representation and the kinds of
research text intended become an eighth ele-
ment for consideration. Narrative inquiry is so
much more than deciding at the last minute that
a paper or dissertation or talk would be more
compelling if a researcher was to tell a story.
When researchers say they want to “do narra-
tive” and what they want to do is to take their
data and turn it into a story, that is, they want to
somehow incorporate story in their research
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texts, this is not what we think of as narrative
inquiry. For those of us engaged in narrative
inquiry, we work from a set of ontological and
methodological assumptions and the questions
of representational form follow from those
assumptions. We detail six considerations below
that may be useful. It is important to note at the
outset “as with all kinds of social science inquiry,
narrative inquiry texts require evidence, interpre-
tive plausibility, and disciplined thought”
(Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 485). However,
there are some aspects of research text writing
that are particular to narrative inquiry.
The first consideration that Connelly and
Clandinin (2006) noted is that as one writes,
one must
continue to think narratively, crafting the research
text with careful attention to the narrative inquiry
commonplaces. The text needs to reflect the tempo-
ral unfolding of people, places and things within
the inquiry, the personal and social aspects of
inquirer’s and participants’ lives, and the places in
the inquiry. (p. 485)
As Murray Orr composed her research text
she thought narratively about the particular sit-
uation she was in. As she thought about repre-
sentational forms for her research text, she
selected letters from the field as one form. She
selected her partner, Jeff, a teacher educator,
as her intended audience. The unsent letters
became a representational form that allowed her
to connect her sense of uncertainty as someone
far from home and in the new position of
researcher rather than in a more familiar position
as teacher, with the ways she understood some
of the stories of the children with whom she was
in relation as stories of being uncertain and on
the margins of school life. The personal and/or
social aspect of the inquiry was foregrounded in
this way by use of the letters from the field.
The letters also reflected the temporal unfold-
ing of the research, during the course of 2
years, and the importance of place, the third
commonplace, as she wrote the letters from
the field to a partner living far away from her
for this time.
Second, the inquirer needs to consider the
possibilities of a range of textual forms, as
31
inquirers think of many different textual forms
reflective “of the shapes lives take” (Connelly
& Clandinin, 2006, p. 485). Inquirers sometimes
draw on favorite literary forms. We see this
narrative process of considering and choosing
textual forms in the ways Pushor selected the
representational form that structured her
research text. Although she had no predeter-
mined representational form, she did have a
strong photographic image of her son on his
first day of kindergarten. From her narrative
beginnings, she pulled forward that image of
her son and herself in that time and place and
used it to shape the form of her research text.
What she eventually selected, a metaphor of a
photo album, allowed her to continue to check
back with the commonplaces of temporality,
sociality, and place.
Borrowing from a favorite novel, Margaret
Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), Pushor worked
out the entailments of her metaphor of photo
album and created word Snapshots to portray
moments in her inquiry experience. She did not
want to lose the sense of unfolding temporality
as she then created “Memorybank Movies” that
enlarged the snapshots with stories that told
what was not visible and what was not audible
in the snapshots. In this way she moved to con-
siderations of place and the personal and social.
She created pieces that “Look[ed] Beyond the
Images,” the stilled and the moving, to connect
the personal of each moment to the larger social
and research context that illuminated the posi-
tioning of parents on the landscape of schools.
Moving through photo album pages allowed
Pushor to share the past, present, and future of
events, people, and places as always in transi-
tion. In the “Snapshots,” the stilled images, she
captured the place of each particular moment. In
the “Memorybank Movies,” she highlighted her
“feelings, hopes, desires, aesthetic reactions, and
moral dispositions” (Connelly & Clandinin,
2006, p. 480) and often those of participants. By
moving to “Looking Beyond the Images,”
Pushor linked the personal to the social—
thinking about the inquiry in relation to
the broader educational and research land-
scape, the current provincial and political
landscape, and the bodies of literature on
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parent involvement, teacher knowledge, and
teacher education.
Third, “the writing of a research text is a nar-
rative act” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 485).
We see this in the ways Pushor and Murray Orr
undertook their tasks. However, it also suggests
that, in a different time, in a different social situ-
ation, and for different purposes, a different
research text might be written. As Pushor and
Murray Orr look back on their research they
awaken to how they understand it differently as
they now work full time in teacher education
settings. As they speak to preservice teachers,
cooperating teachers, school principals, and
parents, they write and talk about their research
in slightly different ways.
Fourth, questions of audience are very sig-
nificant for narrative inquirers. As suggested
above, there are multiple audiences—the
inquirer himself or herself, other participants,
and an imagined reading audience.
Research texts that emphasize one to the exclusion
of others lose impact. Inquirers who forget their
participants and their readers and write only for
themselves, become narcissistic; inquirers who
write for imagined audiences and neglect their par-
ticipants could be unethical; and inquirers who
write only for self and/or participants may be
unable to answer the questions “Who cares?” and
“So what?” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 485)
Conscious of her imagined reading audience
as she wrote her letters from the field to a
teacher educator, Murray Orr created a way to
pull forward aspects of the study relevant to
teaching and teacher education. She wrote about
the personal and about what mattered to a
teacher educator. However, she also held her
participants in her mind. As she wrote, she vis-
ited the school, at first for several days each
week and then much less frequently when she
began work as a teacher educator thousands of
miles away. However, she knew from the out-
set she would negotiate these texts with the
children and, as she returned, she took her
developing research texts back to the children.
The children, then, were always in her mind,
a constant presence as she imagined sharing
her research texts about them with them as
audience.
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 Pushor also kept her various audiences in
mind as she wrote her metaphoric photo album.
She imagined herself sitting together with var-
ious readers—perhaps a parent, teacher, school
leader, teacher educator—flipping backward
and forward through the pages as she shared
her photo album.
Fifth, as research texts are composed, inquir-
ers need to be aware of the criteria by which
work may be judged. Judgment criteria are
still under development in narrative inquiry.
Connelly and Clandinin (2006) suggested the
three commonplaces, and these eight design ele-
ments will be helpful in setting criteria for read-
ers. They also wrote about “good narrative as
having authenticity, as having adequacy and
plausibility” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 185).
These are “criteria that put the emphasis on rec-
ognizability of the field in research text” (p. 184).
Others suggest resonance as a criterion for judg-
ment (Hoffman, 1994), a criterion used by
Pushor and Murray Orr. Comments from their
readers expressing how they saw or heard
themselves in the writers’ narratives speak to
how important resonance with readers is as a
way of illuminating new ways of thinking about
experience. As Murray Orr inquired into the
ways children were composing their stories to
live by, she worked to represent children’s iden-
tity making in ways that invite readers to find
resonances in their practices. Similarly, Pushor’s
parent stories call readers to lay their own sto-
ries of parent knowledge alongside hers.
Sixth, narrative inquirers also need to be
always attentive to, and “make explicit, the
social significance of their work and the larger
body of literature to which their inquiry makes
a contribution” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006,
p. 485). This sixth consideration takes us full cir-
cle back to questions of “So what?” and “Who
cares?” It is important that narrative inquirers
attend closely to these matters and think care-
fully about the research and practice conversa-
tions they want to join in with their work.
Considering the work of other researchers in
these conversations, their standpoints and the-
oretical frameworks, and what is already
known about a particular topic is also crucial
work that narrative inquirers need to do in
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their research texts if they want to occupy a
significant place in shaping the discourse of
policy and practice in an area.
SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS
Our outline of the eight elements constitut-
ing a framework for designing, living out, and
representing narrative inquiries allows us to
circle back to our initial comments about the
appeal and sense of comfort teachers and
teacher educators may find in research that
attends to stories of our experiences. We hope
we have highlighted that narrative inquiry is a
deliberative research process founded on a set
of ontological, epistemological, and method-
ological assumptions that are at play from the
first narrative imaginings of a research puzzle
through to the representation of the narrative
inquiry in research text.
As Connelly and Clandinin (1998a) wrote in
“Asking Questions About Telling Stories,”
telling stories is not enough. We need to move
to the retelling and reliving of stories, that is, to
inquiry into stories. Narrative inquiry requires
attention to narrative conceptualizations as
phenomenon and method, and to the interplay
of the three commonplaces of temporality,
sociality, and place in the inquiry process. It
requires particular kinds of wakefulness to the
eight elements delineated in this article and to
the particular kinds of complexities those ele-
ments raise in the research process.
We feel it is important to carefully consider
the comfort teachers and teacher educators feel
with research that attends to stories. Stories are
the form in which we and other teachers and
teacher educators most often represent our
experiences. Stories, ripe with possibility for
inquiry, surround and envelope us as teachers
and teacher educators. They are the woven fab-
ric of school landscapes. Moving from telling
stories of our teaching practices to narratively
inquiring into our teaching practices situates
teachers and teacher educators in the known
and the familiar while it asks us to make the
known and the familiar strange and open to
new possibility. Teachers and teacher educators
have an opportunity to come to understand
33
more fully our school landscapes and ourselves
as shaping and shaped by these landscapes, and
thus, to shift our practices in relation to teaching
and learning, teachers and students, parents
and families, and curriculum making. Perhaps
we can even change school landscapes.
NOTE
1. In response to an earlier draft of this article, one reviewer
very thoughtfully and articulately wrote,
The issue [of ethics] was well situated in the text but I was
left wondering about the questions posed, “Have I done
enough to support this child?” and, “In schools and class-
rooms, how do we live ethically . . . ?”, such that although
the questions and issues were reasonable, they were cer-
tainly not answerable. Hence, is it more a matter of keep-
ing such questions to the forefront that matters, or is it in
fact seeking to respond? I am not suggesting one or the
other is correct, but rather that it raises an interesting
point for further consideration because, in one sense, it
begins to highlight the sometimes overlooked clash
between the research, the researched and the researcher.
Like the questions we posed, we find the reviewer’s questions
reasonable and indeed complex. They are questions of great
importance for every narrative inquirer to grapple with.
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D. Jean Clandinin is professor and director of the
Centre for Research for Teacher Education and
Development at the University of Alberta. She is a former
teacher, counselor, and psychologist. She coauthored many
chapters, articles, and several books, including Narrative
Inquiry (2000) and Composing Diverse Identities:
Narrative Inquiries Into the Interwoven Lives of
Children and Teachers (2006). She is part of an ongoing
inquiry into teacher knowledge and teachers’ professional
knowledge landscapes. She is past vice president of
Division B of American Educational Research Association
(AERA). She received the AERA’s Early Career Award
(1993) and Division B Lifetime Achievement Award
(2002), the Canadian Education Association Whitworth
Award for educational research (1999), the Kaplan
Research Achievement Award (2001), and a Killam
Scholar at the University of Alberta (2004).
Debbie Pushor is an associate professor in the
Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan in Canada. In her program of research, she is
engaged in narrative inquiries into “parent knowledge” and
into “parent engagement and leadership.” In her under-
graduate and graduate teaching, she makes visible and cen-
tral an often-absent or underrepresented conversation in
teacher education about the positioning of parents in rela-
tion to school landscapes.
Anne Murray Orr is an assistant professor in the
School of Education at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova
Scotia, Canada. Her research program includes narrative
inquiries with classroom teachers to better understand how
students, families, teachers, and administrators experience
life in schools.
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