Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research

Author(s): Clough, P.
Title: Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research
Copyright Year: 2002
Place of Publication: Buckingham/Philadelphia
Publisher: Open University Press


“Although we are freer to present our texts in a variety of forms to diverse audiences, we have different constraints arising from self consciousness about claims to authorship, authority, truth, validaty, and reliability. Self-reflexivity unmasks complex political/ideological agendas hidden in our writing.” (p. 7)


“Narrative is useful only to the extent that it opens up (to its audience) a deeper view of life in familiar contexts: it can make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. As a means of educational report, stories can provide a means by which those truths, which cannot be otherwise told, are uncovered. The fictionalization of educational experience offers researchers the opportunity to import fragments of data from various real events in order to speak to the heart of social consciousness – thus providing the protection of anonymity to the research participants without stripping away the rawness of real happenings” (p.8).


“I have not, however, been content to take a life story and analyse it to produce a life history using the sorts of tools that are normally provided and which hence separate subject and methods, form and content (see Tierney 1995). But I have drawn on the events of lived and content to create fictional stories of lives lived. (p. 9)”


(…) we are always making sense of our lives in stories of one form or another” (p. 13)


“Denzin provides a history and a prospectus for ethnography which is panoptic and bold; a reading of Denzin’s geography of the ethnography project will help the reader to locate my own fictional texts in terms of the epistemologies which Denzin sees attached (or inchoate) in current of ethnographic inquiry.”  (p. 13)


“Briefly, language is not to be seen as being ‘about’, as ‘referring to’, but as creative of objects” (p. 16)”For, despite the sterility of instruments, we never come innocent to a research task, or a situation of events; rather we situate these events not merely in the institutional meanings which our profession provides, but also constitute them as expressions of ourselves” (p. 17)


“My concern in  this book is to bring together the literary exploration of life and self through fiction with some of the furniture of the ethnographic project, and so to question whetther and how the two projects draw on different versions of truth. ” (p. 17)


“The stories require investment – of energy and emotion and intellect – and so will speak differently to different people. But a common feature of the stories is that they all revolve around difficulty and sometimes tragedy.” (p. 18)


“I had no language here, no voice, and without language no power” (p. 22)


“That was something that reached down the canal of my composure and found the ever-leaking corrosion of my father’s presence.” (p. 22)


“I found myself for the second time without language before this man. ” (p. 23)


“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering, and unites it with the human sufferer; terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering, and unites it with the secret cause.” (p. 24)


“But narrative and the expectations of narrative make a problem for those who seek to write ‘believable’ stories. For in making ‘plausible’ narrative I (we) are sometimes forced (tempted) into creating characters who deny the totality of human experienced. ” (p. 64)


“Life and its portions of agony, injustice, fear and illness does not always so oblige, and narrative which portrays such rawness may well attract criticism because it is too dark” (p. 64)


“translating life’s realities as lived by men and women into story, and doing in such a way as still to be believed, is the ethnographic challenge.” (p. 64)


“Even life-historical method – by virtue of being a method – may subvert the profound human impulse to tell stories – stories driven by symbols rather than ‘data’. ” (p. 64)


“Voice does not itself struggle for rights, but is disposed after rights are established; voice is licensed by these rights. It follows from this view that the task for research is largely one of ‘turning up the volume’ on the depressed or inaudible voice.” (p.67)


“The research act of listening to voice must always involve the (broadly defined) processes of both mediation and translation (Tierey 1995); and these functions may be particularly indicated where there are doubts about the capacity of the subject to express an intention; doubts, that is, about their powers of articulation. This is of course, a function of a much larger question of the power relations between the researcher and the researched (Dyson 1998, in p. 68)


“There are, for argument’s sake, two contrary directions in educational research at this time, and they suggest movements in polarized directions. The one, for argument’s sake, largely takes its terms and instruments for granted, and all that remains is to gather data to feed those designs which are given with the instruments – for example in many large-scale funded programmes; this is a process, then, of addition, and it is an endless process. The other – for this argument’s sake – is that more recent ossupation of educational research with the researcher themself, and their very insertion in the process of research; this activity endlessly problematizes terms and instruments, and so is a process of subtraction; of taking away, that is, the methodologically impune, the ideologically suspect.” (p. 82)


“Contextualization of the study in hand tends to be confined to a limited and endlessly inter – and intra-referring literature which shores up its own claims. And it is customary to show how ‘clean’ were the instruments used by arguing their distinctness from us as persons; look, we would typically say, they have been used as techniques by researchers before us; and as they are not of them so they are not of us.  So all the drive of this ‘methodology’ is towards saying: look, there is no infection here.” (p. 82)


“It is not incidental that the research report is, in the main, a text characterized by an austerity of language which makes it hard to read; it is traditionally in the nature of research to suppress the so-called subjective responses of the researcher, or at least to force these within the frame of a morally indifferent scheme. ” (p. 83)


“Thus with such a position it becomes possible to conduct research and/or tell stories of educational settings which bear immediate relation to the truths from which they derive. Such research acts become matters of urgency, for they test the moral and political intent of the researcher (and of the reader). The challenge then is to approach the crises of representation with accounts which embody the truths of those situations – as they are read – and without recourse to methodological apologia.” (p. 100)


Reflections