Stories of Waving and Drowning

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Stories of Waving and Drowning

• Carol Taylor
• DPhil Student
• Sussex School of Education
• May 2007

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Today I will talk about

• Role of narrative in my DPhil story
• My personal narrative images
• Storying the self through being and becoming
  a researcher
• Narrative and reflexivity
• Narrative proliferations

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My DPhil Research

• 16 - 19 education
• Students independent research/ Arts and
  Humanities subjects
• Students identity formation and knowledge
  resources
• Qualitative case study 2 colleges
• Focus group, interviews, classroom observations,
  policy documents, fieldwork diary

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Narrative is like life itself

• Roland Barthes
• The narratives of the world are numberless
  narrative is present in every age, in every
  place, in every society there nowhere is nor
  has been a group of people without narrative. All
  classes, all human groups have their narratives
  Narrative is international, transhistorical,
  transcultural it is simply there, like life
  itself.
• Barthes (1977) Image Music Text

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Narrative and Postmodernism

• Lyotard
• incredulity towards metanarratives
• The politics of the particular
• little stories
• Haraway situated knowledge
• Foucault specific intellectual

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Storying the Self

• Giddens intensification of reflexive
  monitoring
• Polkinghorne
• Narrative is the primary form by which human
  experience is made meaningful
• Telling
• Revising the plot
• Carr the teller of the research story

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Methodological Stories Drowning

• Telling others about my research
• What is my DPhil about?
• How do I present my self as a credible
  researcher?
• Constructing the story
• Changing it
• Instability of the stories and my self

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Methodological Stories Waving

• Interviewee as teller of their story
• Collaboration/ participation
• Interview as therapy
• Interview as embodied action
• Interview as performance
• Play

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Methodological Stories Reflexivity

• Constructing the story of my fieldwork
• In the beginning fieldwork as a journey
• Kvales traveller
• Beginning, middle, end

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The proliferation of stories

• My DPhil as
• Intellectual autobiography
• Others tales, as the view from below
• Immersion
• Abduction
• Detective work
• Weaving
• Hybrid fabrication

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• CAROL TAYLOR
• SUSSEX UNIVERSITY
• cat23_at_sussex.ac.uk