Research on the Boundaries: Narrative Inquiry in the Midst of Organized School Reform

The author centers on narrative inquiry as a “multilayered and many stranded” form of qualitative research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000 Clandinin, D. J. and Connelly, F. M. 2000. Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Google Scholar], p. xvii), one that unfurls in the midst of a plethora of social phenomena and other research agendas (Conle, 1999 Conle, C. 1999. Why narrative? Which narrative? Struggling with time and place in life and research. Curriculum Inquiry, 29: 7–32. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In the article, the narrative inquiry broadly relates to organized school reform in the years leading up to and immediately following the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002). The work depicts the narrative inquirer as part of a human parade (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999 Connelly, F. M. and Clandinin, D. J. 1999. Shaping a professional identity: Stories of educational practice, New York: Teachers College Press. [Google Scholar]) situated on a continuum of time, place, the personal, and the social (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000 Clandinin, D. J. and Connelly, F. M. 2000. Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Google Scholar]). The narrative inquirer, similar to all other researchers, is complicit not only in what stories become lived and relived but also in how stories become told and retold about experiences encountered and enacted in the field of education. In this particular instance, the author focuses on the bumping up places between narrative inquiry and other research and societal perspectives while discussing, from a methodological point of view, the interstices where teacher knowledge, school context, and organized reform meet.