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."