Narrative is used in many ways in educational research. It can simply refer to the nature of data, narratives, or most widely to the holistic narrative approach leading the whole research. In this paper we shall contribute to the discussion by analyzing our place among narrative researchers. We are committed to narrative inquiry and emphasise storytelling and its significance in making sense of our experiences. We work in a research group that is used to work together. In its first project the common interest was teachers’ life that was studied by collecting teachers’ autobiographies. In the next project we were interested in teachers’ coping at work (Estola, Kaunisto, Keski-Filppula, Syrjälä & Uitto 2007) and ways of gaining recognition in the working community. We have become aware of the importance of place; teachers told themselves into places that can be both mental and physical. In our newest research project we study a northern village as a place to live and grow up. We pay attention especially to the relation between narratives and places; we already know that the village is a place of vivid storytelling. We study how teachers tell them and their teaching into that place. We emphasise the meaning for children to actively tell about their everyday life in the school and the village. As researchers of place we are trying to find our own places in the village and among other researchers. Like ethnographers we, too must travel to the place, because the stories are told there. Going to a place and being there makes it possible to take into account the space and the bodies. We are not only listeners but also active partners, observers and storytellers. Stories in the village are told in the interplay of researchers and the villagers. We understand that storytelling is always temporally situated and intertwined to recalling as the personal histories and experiences are told in their cultural and social contexts, so to say they are part of the greater stories (see Baddeley & Singer 2007). The foregoing evokes us to look more closely together our research methodology. In our paper we shall study what new may emerge in the borders of narrative inquiry, oral history and ethnographic research landscapes (cf. Clandinin & Rosiek 2007). We especially consider how to understand the positions of a researcher and a storyteller in our research. Through our narrative material we also look in detail how teachers’ and children’s stories are situated to place and how they are temporally told. Being in the village and actively taking part into the everyday life of the school provides possibilities to discuss what potential place-based education can have (see Gruenewald 2003).

Research approach that combines methods of narrative inquiry, oral history and ethnographical research.

Being as researchers in the village and actively taking part into the everyday life of the school provides possibilities to discuss what potential place-based education can have (see Gruenewald 2003).