Approaches to research that seek to foreground people’s lived experiences, including those of the researcher (s), are gaining in popularity in research in education.  Such methodological approaches that include narrative inquiry, life history and autoethnography, are particularly valuable in practitioner research and in researching professional identities.  They are, however, less common in higher education research.     Broadly speaking, narrative inquiry and life history  focus on the meanings that people ascribe to their experiences, seeking to provide ‘insight that (befits) the complexity of human lives’ (Josselson, 2006, p.4), human lives that are even more complex in our multicultural societies.   Such definitions thus render narrative and life history approaches eminently suitable for researching the lived experiences of those working in higher education communities that are increasingly diverse in their constituencies.  In addition, researchers using these approaches  ‘frequently find themselves crossing cultural discourses, ideologies and institutional boundaries’ (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p.59) as so often do academics.   Their research may develop autoethnographic elements as it progresses or they may employ autoethnography as a methodological approach in its own right.

The four papers in this symposium will each offer examples of using narrative, life history and autoethnography in research in higher education.  Each, in their different way, focuses on the value and richness of using these approaches in researching dimensions of academic identity in different European contexts.  The papers will focus on:

• Early career university academics’ concepts of teaching and professional identity in Estonia and the links between their ‘former lives’ and their professional identities as academics

• Using autoethnography and life history to understand how scholars establish a dialogue, resist, adapt themselves or adopt changes in the process of constructing their professional identities in Spain.  This paper will  focus in particular on the process of writing autoethnography and life history accounts

• The narrative construction of academic careers, focusing on the beginning of such a  career.  This paper asks the question ‘What narratives are culturally available for academics to make sense of how they become academics in Finland?’ and explores how the past is constructed in the present and how this is related to an imagined future

• Transnational academic mobility and new knowledge creation.  This paper uses biographical accounts to show how new modes of knowledge are generated by mobility and will include a focus on the complex relationship between transnational mobility, identity shifts and modes of knowledge creation.

References

Clandinin, D.J. & Roziek, J. (2007) Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: borderland spaces and tensions. In D. J. Clandin (Ed.) Handbook of Narrative Inquiry Mapping a Methodology (pp35-75).  Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage.

Josselson, J. (2006) Narrative research and the challenge of accumulating knowledge.  Narrative Inquiry, 16