I spent today with 30 other people and Lourdes Arquelles finding out about narrative inquiry. I like the inquiry as compared with research, and the idea of a statement of intent as compared with the statement of a problem. The organization of a narrative dissertation feels more holistic, more readable, more organic and natural.

Narratives, discourses, stories, micro and meta, I can’t decide that I want to do a narrative inquiry without knowing first, what I’m going to write about. I think I can decide though that I want to tell a story, that my dissertation tells a story, or multiple and multilayered stories.
So I’ll have to look at the stories, the published and unpublished, the formal and informal about something.

Why a narrative? If I shouldn’t begin with the method, why am I doing just that?
What is my orientation, the ideology and philosophy driving this decision?

What words convey what stories do?
They portray, they explicate, they provoke, they question, they summarise, synthesize, they add to discourses, they intersect and disrupt discourses. They
come together to form meta-stories, they bastion notions, beliefs and understandings about something. Why not a narrative?

Area of inquiry: Learning, adults learning, faculty learning, faculty learning informally, formally.

Initial intentions
To portray adults/faculty members’ understanding of how they as individuals learn.
To juxtapose with or complement “research” on how adults learn.
To expand the body of knowledge on learning.
To document the language and the ways of knowing adult/faculty use to understand their own learning.

Area of inquiry–digital narratives used by educators, distributed conversations of educators.

Area of inquiry
Knowledge and understanding about the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Intent of inquiryTo expand the body of knowledge about the scholarship of teaching and learning.

A start. or something like that.