Jean Connelly & Michael Clandinin on Stories within Narrative Inquiry

While this article mostly deals with narrative inquiry (which is largely tangential to my project on professional community), the authors do make four claims about story that can illuminate the nature and use of narrative in faculty development.

First, humans are storytellers who lead storied lives. I get two ideas--both related but still different--out of this sentence. One, humans as storytellers means we "naturally" tell stories or find it easy to do so, perhaps because we are so conditioned to it. Two, story is a way we make sense out of, or give meaning to, the seemingly random chronology of events that make up our lives. Insofar as being educators is part of our lives, stories give meaning to our work as educators.

Second, narratives add causality to the flow of life events. Again, here's my take: one of the ways we give meaning to our lives--as well as to our work as educators--is to construct cause-and-effect chains that help us understand influence and how things happen. We not only want to know what happened, but more importantly we want to know why. Causality helps explain why.

Third, the meaning of story is not in the events themselves but in the change from start to end. I've said twice above that stories are part of the meaning-making process we use to reflect upon our lives and our work. The events themselves are the individual plot moments within a story; the but the change from beginning to end shows the larger and longer arc of influence that runs through our work as educators. What events in a story are not as important as what those events mean.

And fourth, stories address general problems, but within specific instances. The things that are important to us are likely to be the things that happen to us over and over--the patterns of events we don't understand or that create problems. But solving problems or answering questions can't be done well on such a large and abstract scale because every situation and every person is different. Stories allow us to explore the "big questions" but in a way that doesn't get lost in abstractions and generalities. Stories are always about a specific instance of something happening; we generalize the specifics and the moral of the story to the general patterns of our lives.

citation: Micheal Connelly & D. Jean Clandinin. "Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry." Educational Researcher 19.5 (Jun.-Jul. 1990): 2-14.