In the paper I present I will discuss my use of a multimodal approach to undertaking life history narrative (LHN) interviews. The interviews were conducted in North West England as part of a three year research project exploring the career progression and professional experiences of qualified teachers engaged in postgraduate study designed to enhance provision for pupils aged 5-18 with special educational needs. 

The theoretical stance taken is interpretivist; I seek to explore how the meanings attached to phenomena or practices are constructed and enacted locally. A seminal writer in this area is Goffman (1974:10) who suggests that research should investigate basic “frameworks of understanding” to study how meaning is constructed by individuals through talk and action. The work of Goffman has been extended and applied by Silverman (1997:82) who identifies talk as producing a shared social reality “as speakers modify and embellish each other’s accounts”. The work of Goffman and Silverman suggests that interview transcripts can be studied to explore how people communicate their view of the world and themselves as they talk about their experiences, offer opinions or express emotions. I engage with this idea to consider how the multimodal communication that occurs within a LHN interview can produce a shared reality. 

Undertaking narrative interviews entwines theory and method in that it encourages the researcher to think about the temporal and social context of the events being described, and the temporal and social context of the interview within which the stories are chosen and narrated.  It enables an investigation of how individuals draw upon “narrative resources” to tell particular stories at certain moments in time (Burns and Bell, 2011:4).  My implementation of narrative research draws on the approach advocated by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) who undertake LHN interviews to think through how such methods “render life experiences, both personal and social, in relevant and meaningful ways” (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990:10).  However, while much narrative research focuses on what interviewees say about a topic, my intention is to look at the interaction between interviewer and interviewee, in order to explore how contradictory perspectives can be explored through “jointly developed narratives” (Webster and Mertova, 2007:20).  These narratives can be figured as simultaneously real and constructed.  Campbell and McNamara (2007:100) comment: “(narratives are) reconstructed in the sense that there are real people with lived experiences and identities that replicate and authenticate the narrative accounts of the characters who inhabit the apocryphal tales”. 

Rather than focus on research questions relating to the topics discussed in the interviews aspects of which I have already published (see Woolhouse, 2015) , my focus in the paper will be to consider the questions:

• What can the context and style of communication, rather than the content reveal? 

• What can I learn as a researcher from reflecting upon the use of multimodal interviews?

To answer these questions I draw together a multimodal visual method with social semiotics to analyse the production of meaning and to focus upon self-positioning and emphasise individual agency. Multimodal approaches are advocated by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) who argue that these methods go beyond the linguistic and can encompass, for example, the use of images, spatiality, tactile experience etc. As Kress (2011:237) points out; “multimodality focuses on the material means for representation; the resources for making texts (and thus meaning) … that go beyond language”. 

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