Move from life stories to life histories: collect stories of action within theories of context¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 1 claim (1 for) · 1 study (1 theoretical), q1 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description¶

The article recommends that educational research move beyond collecting personal narratives toward life history work that builds contextual background around the story. The life story is a personal reconstruction of experience elicited in loosely structured interviews, whereas the life history also elicits other people's accounts, documentary evidence and historical data to develop a wide intertextual and intercontextual mode of analysis. The aim is a dialogue of a 'story of action within a theory of context'.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A change in the nature of collaboration: the teacher becomes more than a teller of stories and a more general investigator, and the external researcher is actively involved in textual and contextual construction.

Constraints¶

• The author acknowledges that adding genealogies of context opens up substantial dangers of changing the relationship between story giver and research taker and of tilting the balance further towards the academy.

Target Learners¶

• teachers participating in collaborative life history research

Target Learning Goals¶

• teachers' reappropriation of their lived experiences and understanding of the social and historical contexts of their lives

Claims¶

• Storying is socially and politically non-neutral: it privileges some storylines and silences others [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Use myriad field texts and the analytical tools of broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying to move from field texts to research texts

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Goodson, Ivor F. (1994). 'The Story So Far': Personal Knowledge and the Political. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED376160. doi:10.1080/0951839950080109