Narrative Inquiry as Pedagogy in Education: The Extraordinary Potential of Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving Stories of Experience

As they wrote this article attentive to the focus of this volume of "Review of Research in Education" on "extraordinary pedagogies for working within school settings serving nondominant students" (C. Faltis & J. Abedi, 2011, personal communication), the authors held close understandings of ways in which narrative inquiry embodies potential for shaping extraordinary pedagogy in education. They see this potential of narrative inquiry to remake life in classrooms, schools, and beyond as centrally situated in Clandinin and Connelly's (1998) understanding that it is education that lives at the core of narrative inquiry "and not merely the telling of stories." This understanding of narrative inquiry, that is, as attending to and acting on experience by co-inquiring with people who interact in and with classrooms, schools, or in other contexts into living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories of experience, lives at the heart of this article. The authors stay attentive to this understanding in each of the four upcoming parts: "The Transcendent Power of Story," "Turning Toward the Study of Narrative in Academia," "Diverse Methodological Understandings of Narrative in Education Research," and "Narrative Inquiry, Education Pedagogy, and the Composing of Lives." Their attentiveness to this central aspect of ways in which narrative inquiry opens possibilities for shifting stories, and therefore, lives, connects them with the knowing of many people whose thinking in relation with story, narrative, experience, and lives shapes their thinking and living as narrative inquirers. In this way, too, the article draws readers toward the voices of people who share a vision of the centrality of attending to lives, and the making and remaking of lives, as vitally important work in classrooms, schools, and communities. (Contains 11 notes.)