Narrative and storying genres in educational inquiry risk disempowering the very people they claim to empower¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoreticalr3·q1
Currency · newest study 1995 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q1 i? The new narrative genres have strengths but also weaknesses that may prove incapacitating, so sponsoring them in the name of empowerment may effectively disempower the people and causes they seek to work with. → Goodson 1995
Evidence¶
Goodson 1995¶
Goodson, I. F. (1995). The story so far: Personal knowledge and the political. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 89–98. doi:10.1080/0951839950080109 (an earlier version, 1994, is ERIC ED376160)
q1 · i? · theoretical · r3
Theoretical argument in the paper's introduction: the author, sympathetic to narrative genres, nonetheless argues they require close scrutiny because their weaknesses may prove incapacitating. The article offers a reasoned argument, not empirical data, for this caution.
"For whilst they have some obvious strengths, there are I think, some weaknesses which may prove incapacitating. If so, we may be sponsoring genres of inquiry in the name of empowerment, whilst at the same time, effectively disempowering the very people and causes we seek to work with."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Adventure programs can be designed to teach participants a transferable empowerment process, not only deliver an intervention — related
- One adult educator's first-person reflection reports that facilitated class discussions left her feeling empowered as an individual contributor — reports the opposite
- Modernist discourses have produced contradictory environmental effects, raising awareness of problems while helping cultivate stories that construe the earth as an object of instrumental value — related
- Equipping caregivers with MUAC tapes empowered them to track child nutrition and become community health advocates — related
- Storying is socially and politically non-neutral: it privileges some storylines and silences others — related
- The storied format of personal experience research can transcend the specialties of the immediate research field to influence a larger research community — related
- Storytelling from work experience serves as a key vehicle of knowledge production and communication in adult classroom quasi-communities — related
- Narrative/story writing is the most common genre used to operationalize writing in K‑5 writing‑motivation self‑report studies, suggesting a bias toward narrow aspects of writing — related
- Students enact new CSCL technologies according to communication genres of the past, producing informal rather than scholarly discourse — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
narrative-genres-may-disempower-while-claiming-empowerment |
title |
Narrative and storying genres in educational inquiry risk disempowering the very people they claim to empower |
description |
Narrative and storying genres in educational inquiry risk disempowering the very people they claim to empower |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
1995 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-09-26 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — goodson-1995 |
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