I've been thinking about food a lot lately. It sounds silly, given the fact that we all HAVE to think about this topic for our projects, but I'm taking it to heart. I've started questioning how I feel after I eat fast food. I never feel good, but I also ignore those feelings because I simply don't have time to do something about it. I am always, always on the run. I don't make time to prepare food for at-the-time consumption nor for future eating. I always find something else that's more important, that requires more of my time. But ignorance is not bliss. I have to face the fact that eating better is something that must become a priority in my life.

I spent a good half hour in the four or so organic aisles of Wegmans last night examining prices and food choices. I used to think that eating organic was some hippie deal...which you'd think I would be into since I am a hippie at heart. But I never gave it a passing thought. Until now, that is. I'm starting to realize that "going organic" may be better for both me and my environment. It also didn't mean I had to be ridiculous about it. Sometimes there are things I want that I can't find in those aisles or that I simply like the way they are. But I am starting to make the switch.

I bought some organic chips and cheese balls and bananas. I wanted to buy the organic strawberries (they actually looked better than the regular ones) but I just couldn't afford the extra money for them. Rome wasn't built in a day, though, and what goes into my stomach won't change overnight. The seed has been planted, however, and I look forward to budgeting so I can afford the organic food. I've even got my mom on board. It feels good to be on the ball about something. I'm happy to be opening my mind and my choices up to someth

There were two things that immediately came to mind when I started reading about oral histories. First I thought of my volunteer job at the Moorestown historical society. I often give tours of the Smith-Cadbury mansion to older folks from the town. I always think it's interesting when they tell me their own personal history and the town's history as I'm showing them around.

The second thing I thought of was a different volunteer job that I just started at Pitman Manor. There were a variety of different things I could do there (I'm working on service credits for an honor society), but the job I ended up with was to help an elderly woman record her history for her daughter. I'll be doing this with her this upcoming Saturday. I think this article will help give me some direction with this project.

Memorable Quotes:
 
"While methods of eliciting and recording them were more or less rigorous in any given case, the absence of audio- and videotape recorders--or digital recording devices--necessitated reliance on human note-takers, thus raising questions about reliability and veracity."

This part made me think of the Bible. I don't want to start a religious rant (and I was raised Catholic) but I have never believed in the Bible, at least not word for word. Some people use exact quotes from the Bible to make certain social and political points. But while the Bible is now written record, and started out as note-taking and pure oral history, which I don't think can be 100% reliable.

"Few people leave self-conscious records of their lives for the benefit of future historians. Some are illiterate; others, too busy. Yet others don't think of it, and some simply don't know how. And many think--erroneously, to be sure--that they have little to say that would be of historical value. By recording the firsthand accounts of an enormous variety of narrators, oral history has, over the past half-century, helped democratize the historical record."

I like that the every day, ordinary person still plays and important part in recording history.

"Oral history interviews are often quite simply good stories. Like literature, their specificity, their deeply personal, often emotionally resonant accounts of individual experience draw listeners--or readers--in, creating interest and sympathy. Edited carefully, they can open the listener to a life very different from his or her own in a non-threatening way. Contextualized thoughtfully, they can help a reader understand personal experience as something deeply social."

I am working on a non-fiction book about someone's life right now. I am interested primarily in creative non-fiction and writing about real people's lives as a career path. This paragraph really added fuel to my interest.

Chapter 4 of Clandinin and Conelly's Narrative Inquiry - "What Do Narrative Inquirers Do?" - was, I thought, a really great example of the usefulness and interest of narrative inquiry. It was a much easier read than "Situation Narrative Inquiry." I felt more connected to the text because of the stories within, and was therefore more interested in what the authors had to say. I think that in a way, this thought proves a point of narrative inquiry: that more meaningful, personal information can have just as big of an effect on research as qualitative information, and for some areas, the best effect.

The authors talked about a "three dimensional narrative inquiry space," which I found to be logical and helpful as a focus of narrative inquiry. It also made me think of something else - this feeling that as I am finishing my bachelor's degree in writing, I find that all of the concepts I've learned seem to pop up over and over again. And what's more, seemingly unrelated topics that I have taken classes in also seem to overlap and come together to form one blanket of useful information that I can apply to many, if not all, aspects of my education. Just as place and time form an intersection within narrative inquiry, so can my background(s) in philosophy, psychology, and advertising intersect with things like multi genre writing, creative work and layout and design.

Quotes:
P. 50
"Dewey's work on experience is our imaginative touchstone for reminding us that in our work, the answer to the ques­ tion, Why narrative? is, Because experience. Dewey provides a frame for thinking of experience "beyond the black box;' that is, beyond the notion of experience being irreducible so that one cannot peer into it. With Dewey, one can say more, experientially, than "because of her experience" when answering why a person does what she does."

P.59
"Jean went backward to her long-ago classroom and forward to her present-day research and to questions ofwhat it means to be a narra­ tive inquirer on the professional knowledge landscape. All of this takes place within a place-her present-day place within a research univer­ sity; where she does research and writes about her work with teachers, and her long-ago place, where she is a country child educated in a small-town school."

P. 60
"What starts to become apparent as we work within our three-dimensional space is that as narrative inquirers we are not alone in this space. This space enfolds us and those with whom we work. Narrative inquiry is a relational in­ quiryas we work in the field, move from field to field text, and from field text to research text."

I'm sure I'm not the first or last to say this: Reading DJ Clandinin's "Situating Narrative Inquiry" really made my head hurt. It wasn't so much the length as the academic language used that made it hard to get through. After I worked at it and revealed what he was trying to say, I liked it and I thought it was very interesting overall. I liked all the different examples given of each turn, and especially the way in which the information really seemed to make sense to a lot of different areas - historical, sociological, psychological, philosophical, etc. I was most interested in what Clandinin had to say about turns 3 and 4. I just wish it had been a bit more straightforward.

A quick reference/personal reminder of the points of this article:

Four Themes in Turn Towards the Narrative Inquiry
(1) a change in the relationship between the person conducting the research and the person participating as the subject (the relationship between the researcher and the researched), (2) a move from the use of number toward the use of words as data, (3) a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific, and finally (4) a widen- ing in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing. 

Quotes:

P. 7
"We use the term turn strategically because we want to emphasize the movement from one way of thinking to another and highlight the fact that such changes can occur rapidly or slowly, depending on the experience of the researchers and their experiences when doing research."

P. 18/19

"Bruner (1986), in fact, argues that positivistic research begins in wild metaphor. He asserts that it is through the wild metaphors and their interconnections that researchers arrive at a level of abstraction where meaning can be made of the phenomenon of interest. According to Bruner, at that point in time, researchers working
from a base of paradigmatic knowing then define the phenomenon and develop instruments that provide numbers for accounting for the relationships that emerged metaphorically.They continue to use a restricted and confined language, as free of metaphor as possible to account for the facts they observe and the laws they develop. As a result, since metaphor is a tool for opening and deepening understanding, the opportunity for insight and meaning making is flattened. As researchers became less content with labeling numerically the level of kindness or the degree of hope, they may become more interested in understanding the stories of kindness and hopefulness. They begin to wonder about the stories, words, and other linguistic accounts their research masks. In taking this step, they may begin to turn toward narrative inquiry. When researchers become interested in the nuances of meaning, then reducing what was originally word data to numbers is viewed as restricting opportunities for meaning making and understanding."

P. 22
"In the United States, works such as Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) An American Dilemma or David Potter’s (1954) People of Plenty sought to describe an American character, a set of traits or beliefs that could be used to understand contemporary American society as a whole. In both instances, a single topic—race relations for Myrdal and the middle class for Potter—served as a lens through which to understand the entire nation. In Europe, structuralists such as Claude Levi-Strauss and historians of the Annales School worked at the same level of abstraction. Levi-Strauss’s (1969) key ideas, that societies were hot or cold, raw or cooked, gave other social scientists a frame through which they could see things whole."