I wasn’t sure what to expect when I found I was presenting at the Narrative Practitioner conference in Wrexham in Wales. It turned out to be a very enjoyable and interesting experience, with an impressive number and mix of keynote speakers.
Day One:
By the time I had conquered the long drive up from Brighton, and navigated the Wrexham roads, I found myself sadly late for Donald Polkinghorne’s keynote talk ‘The narrativity of practice’. What little I did catch was interesting and more than set the tone for the rest of the conference.
Notes:
- If only the observable is real, we should talk about humans as we talk about objects. Things are lost if we do this.
- Being human is temporal, we have a beginning, middle and end.
- Ricoeur, humans as actors
- Story helps us to understand and inform our next actions.
- There is something expressed in narrative about being human which is not expressed elsewhere.
- Pragmatism – Doing things moving through life as actors/practitioners
- Goals are contextualised - not just out there
- Practice goals: ethical, life, means, conflicts
- Retrospective narratives: novice -> expert
- Can be used to invent prospective narratives
I generated a list of types of stories, which I shall have to revisit and revise in future:
- Retrospective stories
- Research articles
- Past experiences
- Oral tradition
- Prospective stories
- Designs (proposals and ‘method sections’)
- Qualitative + Quantitative designs
- Personal stories
- Vicarious (Oral, colleagues, research)
- Authorities (government, empirically based practice)
- Schonn’s thinking in action / walkthroughs
This keynote was followed by another keynote from Didier Danthois (School of Sacred Clowning) with a performance entitled ‘The wisdom of innocence’. I twittered about how there was a clown on the lecturn, there really was. After his performance he spoke about how the unknown leads to fear, so we need to learn to play instead. He felt sad that you leave innocence behind as you grow up.
The afternoon sessions were all interesting, but my notes are sparse so apologies for omissions or inaccuracies.
Narratives of Action Research (Melissa Sevista Nolas):
- Action research is a relational methodology
- Gergen 1997, Bowen 1998, Jovchelovitch 2007
- Working with groups, communities and organisations
- Dialogue (Levin 1946, 1958, Freire 1970)
- However, little research on action research.
- Bowen 1998 – Context in action research is emergent
- Roth 2006 – Action research methodology books should come with warning stickers
- Ways to learn:
- Didactic model – inadequate
- Apprenticeship model – Determined by opportunity
- Stories – Sharing experiences of Action Research projects
- Shareable world (Kearney 2002:3)
- Riessman Organising Experience
- Schonn Reflecting on Practice
- Polkinghorne (1998) Practitioners work with narrative knowledge
- Rappaport (1995) Narrative as a resource
- Stories were supportive in terms of sensemaking, identity, construction and communication
- Support roles and retelling to elicit responses
- Can methodological narratives still be considered stories?
- Are they asking for more stories or just different types?
- Making scientific research messy.
- Does technical rationality exclude storytelling?
- People who work in industry are doing action research.
Taking Risks: an exploration into women’s perceptions of ante natal risk in pregnancy’ (Dawn Jones):
- Beck 2004:203
- Late modernity
- Scientific narratives – rational response to problem solving
- Ontological security
- Now we have a need to know the risk.
- Risks are socially constructed sources of danger, are ‘knowledge’ and not ‘ignorance’
- Overt vs. Covert research
I ended the day with a clear task for myself: distinguish discourse, story and narrative in my research and make sure I keep to the distinction.
The day concluded with exemplary music from Liam Robinson and Thomas Fairbairn and dancing at the conference dinner.
I then had to face the horror which was the student halls, but the less said about them the better.
Day Two:
The morning keynote was from Roshan Doug who spoke on ‘The business of poetry’. Some interesting points I noted:
- As researchers we are Faust.
- If we look to Milton – we are all Satan, we all want to set up on our own
- The purpose of a poet is to defamiliarise our familiarity
- Hermes leads to hermeneutic
- James Gee
- Kirkegaard – Lived forwards and understood backwards
The following session I presented, so I have no notes from the other talks as I was immersed in re-reading my own slides. I know I came away convinced I need to look further into space and the narratives of objects: space of bodies, space of objects.
The afternoon keynote was from Gavin J. Fairbairn (I never asked whether he was related to the previous evening’s entertainment) on ‘Storytelling, Ethics and Academic Writing’.
Rough notes:
- Real – Biographic Experience <-case studies
- Vs
- True – True to life (not ncy factual)
- Scientific labelling for remoteness
- Storytelling for closeness and empathy
- Hypothetical stories are the moral philosophers tool
- Weingartner – ‘Teaching as a subversive activity’
- Crap detecting, learning value or lack of
- Researchers should write so that as many people as possible are able to understand their work.
- Clarity of writing
- Tools for Obfuscation
- Big words
- Difficult ones
- No explanation
- Jargon (best from other fields)
- Liberal use of citation
- Obscure citation better
- Always cite the greats (name drop, esp. philosophers and social scientists)
- More refs mean more ‘academic’
- Circular arguments
- Difficult prose
- Ask yourself:
- Is this clear?
- Is this free from jargon?
- Is the structure helpful?
- Are the citations needed?
- Academic writing should be like storytelling
- They should tell their tales and make their research into a narrative
In the afternoon I chose to attend a workshop by Robin Williamson (who also provided the evening entertainment over dinner). This was followed by a small student dramatisation of a teaching play for encouraging discussions about the difficulties faced by new students.
Day Three:
The final day was short but no less interesting.
Dr Alex Carson gave a fascinating keynote talk entitled ‘The Narrative Practitioner’. Again my notes are rough, but I think they serve my purpose:
- “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a storytelling animal” 1985:216
- Narratives are the practice not measurable against the practice
- Polkinghorne 1988:13: organisational scheme expressed in story form.
- Intelligibility
- Form of life
- Shared culture, understanding, social bonding
- Develops our tradition
- Max Weber
- Disenchantment of the world after the enlightenment
- Subject vs object divide
- Assumption that our ordinary perceptions are faulty
- Thick description, Geertz
- Fundamentally, the researcher makes the choices. You can’t hide behind approach. Research is value-laden and unbiased.
- The concepts of quantitative and qualitative research are just grand narratives (a la Foucault). They structure your perceptions, don’t validate according to them.
- You should own up to reflexivity in research project
-
Narrative Analysis:
- “all practices aim at some good” (Aristotle)
- Deconstruction
- Critical Conversation
- Reconstruction (stronger)
- Holistic
- Developmental
- (Demosthenes “I suffered nothing”)
-
Narrative Practitioner:
- Fired with passion (Hegel)
- Knows he/she doesn’t know
- Open to further conversations
- Reflective critical phenomenology
- Says more about who we are, what we do (not reductionist)
-
Develops our self understanding
All in all a very good conference, one I look forward to attending again despite the student halls. Now I just need to write the associated paper.
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