Experience-led Knowledge as an Educative Knowledge: A Narrative Inquiry with Teachers

Author(s):

José Contreras Domingo(submitting)Remei Arnaus Morral(presenting)Emma Quiles Fernández(presenting)Mª Dolores Molina Galvañ Clara Arbiol González

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 06 B, Narrative and Visual Methods in Teacher Education Research

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

15:30-17:00

Room:

B223 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Shosh Leshem

Contribution

This paper fits into the framework of a research project about the experience-led knowledge of primary school teachers that seeks to think about their contributions to initial teacher education (EDU2011-29732-C02-01. Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Spain). The project combines the self-inquiry of the members of the research team of their practices and experiences in initial teacher education, with studies with teachers about their experience-led knowledge. The reason for this combination is to give shape to the knowledge that we generate from our studies with teachers, stemming from a concern for the educative knowledge that might be necessary for teacher education. It is a narrative research that allows us, first, to look at educational experience through a narrative approach; second, to study experience-led knowledge as a narrative knowledge, and, finally, leads us to the production of narratives as a way of knowing that is potentially formative for future teachers.

The pedagogical knowledge of teachers does not have the same characteristics as theoretical knowledge, given that it brings together aspects of educational knowing, doing and being that are difficult to formalize in terms of academic knowledge (Clandinin, 1985; Clandinin et al. 1993; Elbaz, 2005; Korthagen, 2010; Tardif, 2004; Van Manen and Li, 2002). As a way of knowing, it is not exactly a group of items of knowledge, because it is a knowledge linked to living that is not easily separated from this living. The knowledge of teachers that conserves the qualities of experience (that is, that which asks questions about what is happening and about the mystery of the other; see Gadamer, 1977; Jay, 2005; Contreras and Pérez de Lara, 2010), has to do with what we recognise as wisdom: it shows the complexity and subtlety of the multiple dimensions of embodied pedagogical knowledge (Biesta, 2012). What this experience-led knowledge has to teach us cannot be reduced to a single clear message, but rather has multiple layers and different readings. At the same time as it shows a way of doing in practice, it allows for the understanding of an educational endeavour as something more complex than a collection of methodological instructions.

How to bring this meaning of knowledge to teacher education? How to show it or communicate it? How to do it when to educate in experience-led knowledge is not simply a new content but rather a way of cultivating the qualities of experience and educative wisdom through the process of teacher education?

The narrative perspective provides us with guidance in answering these questions. Experience-led knowledge can be understood narratively, given that it is generated and recreated in a relationship of thinking about the life being lived (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, 2013; Xu and Connelly, 2010). Narrative research supposes a telling and retelling of what is lived, and this retelling allows us to find new ways of relating to that which is lived.

To narrate implies to tell stories in which the plot (Ricoeur, 1984) is brought together, episodes which combine different levels of significance and meaning and which lend themselves to diverse interpretations. To narrate puts into play subjective experiences and processes, which also generate subjective relationships and processes in the person receiving or hearing the story. Because of this, the stories offer a formative potential, given that they set off processes of subjectification in the receiver (McEwan & Egan, 1995).

In this paper we want to look more closely at these aspects, showing the ways that we are carrying out our studies with educators as a way of exploring experience-led knowledge and of going deeper into them as narratives.

Method

Our research process bases itself mainly on the narrative inquiry perspective of Clandinin and Connelly (2000; Clandinin 2013) and on the phenomenological perspective of Van Manen (2003). At this stage of the research we have chosen ten primary school teachers who do their job with concern for what they do, and for their students. We carry out observations of their classes and hold reflexive conversations in which we seek to share a thinking relationship with the teachers about what they experience in their classrooms. We write reflexive diaries and “field texts” (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) out of these encounters and observations. These first texts lead us to go deeper narratively, later making new stories that can show, alongside the living events, the pedagogical questions that they awaken in us and that we find relevant for a pedagogical reflection upon educative practice. Narrative research allows us to narrate educative experiences and to go deeper into them narratively, that is, to take the stories of experience to be able to ask ourselves questions about them, “thinking narratively” (Xu and Connelly, 2010). Amongst the different forms that we are seeking as we go deeper into the stories narratively we can highlight the following: a) asking about the connections between the events that make up the plot; b) looking for new possibilities of meaning, re-narrating; c) generating new thinking about the mystery of the relationships between the events of the plot; d) showing the same events from other possible ways of living and reacting to them, or instead from the experience of others implicated in the situations; e) “subjunctivizing” a story (Bruner, 2002), creating for it more possibilities of signification and experience; f) asking ourselves questions in the narrating that open up the imagination to potential meanings; g) looking for in the stories and finding their potential for metaphors and images that stimulate the pedagogical imagination (Greene, 1995); h) creating counter-stories (Clandinin) that can show the possibility of other developments, other meanings, other subjective motivations in events, or other social or institutional conditions. On occasions these ways of going deeper narratively lead to new versions in the stories; but other times it means to nurture the previous versions with elements that awaken a thinking relationship with the events that are narrated.

Expected Outcomes

As Clandinin proposes (2013), going deeper narratively and looking for new ways to tell about what is lived is the way to explore the modes and conditions of the narrative in order to think through multiple pedagogical meanings, and to explore new ways of telling the occurrences that open up to potential new ways of life. Experience-led knowledge has its own expressive potential in narrative forms, it can be researched, explored and gone deeper into narratively, and it allows us to bring to teacher training a way of knowing and of expression of the educative experience. Narrative research of the experience-led knowledge of educators who sustain a thinking relationship with what they experience on a daily basis in their classrooms does not only look to transmit valuable experiences, but also to bring out in students their own experience-led knowledge, cultivating a thinking relationship with the stories of experience. In this sense, the stories present an educative potential, since they set off processes of subjectivization in the receiver: it puts into play their own subjectivity in relation to the situations that are being narrated and claims an answer from them in the need to give meaning to the story that is being told (McEwan & Egan, 1995). It promotes in the students of teacher training a thinking of their own joined to experiential situations, thus helping them to give form and expression to their own thinking linked to their own experiences. Teacher education gives a horizon of meaning to the research and to the knowledge it generates: an educative knowledge. As educational research, the knowledge that is generated seeks its validation in the effects it has on those who receive it, in its formative value (Bochner, 2000; 2012).

References

Biesta, Gert (2012) “The future of teacher education: Evidence, competence or wisdom?” RoSE - Research on Steiner Education, 3:1, 8-21. Bochner, Arthur P. (2000) “Criteria Against Ourselves”. Qualitative Inquiry, 6:2, 266-272. Bochner, Arthur P. (2012) “On first-person narrative scholarship”. Narrative Inquiry, 22:1, 155-164. Bruner, Jerome (2002). Making stories. Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Clandinin, D. Jean (1985) “Personal Practical Knowledge: A study of teachers’ classroom images”. Curriculum Inquiry, 15:4, 361-385. Clandinin, D. Jean (2013) Engaging in Narrative Inquiry, Walnut Creek, Cal.: Left Coast Press. Clandinin, D. Jean & Connelly, F. Michael (2000). Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D. Jean, et al. (eds.) (1993) Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn. New York: Teachers College Press. Contreras, José & Pérez de Lara, Nuria (Comps.) (2010) Investigar la experiencia educativa. Madrid: Morata. Elbaz-Luwisch, Freema (2005) Teachers’ Voices. Stoytelling and Possibility. Greenwich, CT (EUA): Information Age Publishing. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1977) Verdad y método. Salamanca: Sígueme (Wahrheit und Methode. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 19754). Greene, Maxine (1995) Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Jay, Martin (2005) Songs of Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Korthagen, Fred A. J.(2010) 'How teacher education can make a difference', Journal of Education for Teaching, 36:4, 407-423. McEwan, Hunter & Egan, Kieran (Eds.), Narrative in Teaching, Learning, and Research (pp. 166-183). New York: Teachers College Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1984) Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tardif, Maurice (2004) Los saberes del docente y su desarrollo profesional. Madrid: Narcea. Van Manen, Max (2003) Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. London, Ontario: The Althouse Press & New York: SUNY Press. Van Manen, Max & Li, Shuying (2002) “The pathic principle of pedagogical language”. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18:2, 215-224. Xu, Shijing and Connelly, Michael (2010) “Narrative inquiry for school-based research”. Narrative Inquiry, 20:2, 349-370.

Author Information

José Contreras Domingo (submitting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Remei Arnaus Morral (presenting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Emma Quiles Fernández (presenting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Mª Dolores Molina Galvañ

Universitat de Valencia

Didáctica y Organización Escolar

Valencia

Clara Arbiol González

University of Valencia, Spain

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