Intersecting Methodologies to Support the Telling of Stories in Education Research: Appreciative Inquiry Within Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

Narrative inquiry has often been merged with other methodologies to conduct research in schools. Its interweaving with appreciative inquiry as a methodology to research within education, however, is newly emerging. In this study, which interweaves the two methodologies, narrative inquiry and appreciative inquiry are used to examine stories of teaching and explore teacher identity—an evolution of narrative inquiry that facilitates the telling of participant school stories in a focused and intentional way through an appreciative inquiry framework. This paper explores the interweaving of the methodologies and provides an example of its use. It draws on a doctoral study titled Identity as pedagogy: Locating the shadows in the sacred space between, which examined the stories of teacher identities and the ways such stories manifest in pedagogy, with a group of teachers from a common educational jurisdiction in eastern Canada. The data that emerged through the appreciative inquiry process were narratively analyzed and understood through the common themes they presented.

Introduction

There is a plethora of ways to explore lived experiences in schools to gain understanding of the meanings people construct from their experiences. Within a qualitative research paradigm, researchers employ many designs and approaches to investigate the stories of those experiences. The ways members of school communities (teachers, students, school leaders, families) know and experience their school contexts also leads researchers to explore approaches that best allow them to understand those stories of school: As a result, methodological approaches that explore school stories, evolve. Such evolution might involve a growing understanding of the approach and refining its use, or approaches might be merged bringing forth nuanced ways to explore research questions.

This article describes the author’s use of interweaving narrative inquiry (NI) and appreciative inquiry (AI) as the methodological framework for a research study, and is presented as further evolution of narrative inquiry to understand school experiences, specifically as they inform teacher identity. The study, the basis of a doctoral dissertation titled Identity as pedagogy: Locating the shadows in the sacred space between (Tucker, 2021), explored the stories that shaped and informed the teacher identities of the participants. The paper begins with a description of the research context. It then provides a brief overview of each methodology and its appropriateness for the study, and addresses the ways the methodologies were brought together and employed. Next, the study is described, illustrating how both methodologies might be interwoven in educational research. The paper concludes with consideration of what the interweaving of NI and AI as a novel methodological approach, can offer the field of educational research.

Situating the Study in Which the Methodologies Were Employed

Study Context

The participants in this study worked in a Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) school system, whose history continues to shape narratives for teachers. NL was the last province to join Canada. Prior to joining Canada, Newfoundland was a British colony. The development of education in Newfoundland lagged other parts of Canada: The primary reason for Britain’s support of the colony was resource extraction (McCann, 1998) thus education was not a priority. Until the late 19th century, fishers seasonally came from England, Ireland, and France. Survival was dependent on everyone participating in the production of fish, children included (Johnson, 1985). Because the colony’s income came from Britain and limited taxation, the economic position was usually dire with no money to fund schools. Merchants, who lived in St John’s, the seat of government and wealth in the province, brokered with European countries, and traded dry food goods and supplies with the fishers in exchange for their fish. Fishers typically lived in poorer, coastal communities. The exploitation of fishers by merchants manifested as domination and subordination of people that was perpetuated culturally.

Permanent settlement brought rudimentary schooling, first by churches, then upon joining Canada in 1949, by government whose goal to improve the economic prosperity of the province: Both had detrimental effects on education in the province (McCann, 1998). Small communities identified strongly with their churches. The churches’ significant influence over the electorate shaped public opinion about the purpose of school. Church-run school boards with government oversight remained in place until 1994 when NL’s first public school system was established. Previous attempts to improve quality of schools and teachers had given rise to teacher training in St John’s where prospective teachers spent time in schools and returned to their communities as trained teachers. Schools were modeled on British approaches of the time—focused on public examinations: The task of teachers was primarily understood to prepare students for such examinations (McCann, 1998). Over time, concerted efforts were made to standardize NL schools. Public exams, held over from the colonial educational approach, were administered to ensure that education around the province was equal. However, inherent in the results of those exams was the assessment of the quality of each teacher.

It is important to consider the historical context of NL education because its related effects continue to have implications for its educators. While many advancements modernized the NL school system, cultural attitudes about education are very difficult to shift. Remnants of colonialism can be recognized in narratives of the current system, and impact teacher identity. Thus the importance of an appreciative methodology with an eye towards a hopeful future, to consider teacher stories shadowed (Fitzgerald et al., 2010) within this context.

Study Intent

The combined methodology of narrative appreciative inquiry was utilized to explore stories of the NL system that are embedded in teacher identity. Purposively selected participants were teachers who each held a different role within the NL school system: a classroom teacher, a school principal from a K-12 school, a system superintendent, and a system director. Fullan and Quinn (2016) encouraged educators—regardless of the role they play in an education system—to consider themselves as teachers, and those with whom they work as their class. Participants were invited to consider the ways in which their teacher identities were shaped and influenced by the educational system of their experiences. Through participation in the study, they interrogated the stories to which their teacher identities were bound, and considered how their teacher identities manifested as pedagogy.

Interweaving Narrative and Appreciative Inquiry

In this study, NI was the methodology to interpret and come to understand the experience of telling and considering participants’ stories: AI was the framework in which their stories were told. To interweave NI and AI, an understanding of both methodological approaches is necessary. In what follows, a brief overview of each methodology and how it was employed in the study is provided, concluding with a description of how the methodologies interweaved.

Narrative Inquiry in the Study

NI is a commonly utilized approach in qualitative research, and one that has been used in many studies to understand the experiences of teachers and students in schools. In the early part of the 21^st century, Clandinin and Connolly (2000) definitively situated NI as a means through which researchers might examine lived experiences in schools. Since its inception, NI has evolved, and continues to evolve, as researchers seek to understand the stories of participants and find ways to allow those stories to emerge in more particular and contextually responsive ways.

NI facilitates the exploration of lived experiences of participants, “inquir[ing] into narratives and stories of people’s life experiences” (Kim, 2016, p. 346). The etymology of the word narrative provides valuable insight into how NI might be considered: Coming from the Latin narrat-, meaning related or told, narrare, to tell, and gnarus, to know (Kim, 2016, p. 23), it is through the telling and relating of narratives that researchers come to know about the phenomena being studied. Through NI, stories are examined and lived experiences tilled for meaning. As Clandinin and Connolly (2000) put forth, experiences are shared through stories, and narrative inquiry is a way to think about those storied experiences. Inquiring narratively opens a way to consider what surfaces from the “living, telling, retelling and reliving” (Kim, 2016, p. 160) of stories.

NI is used to conduct qualitative research in many disciplines, thus there are diverse interpretations of what it means to engage in NI and of how the methodology is employed (Chase, 2018). To address the methodological variations, Chase drew on Thomas (2010) to guide researchers, using four key questions to situate studies in NI. Those questions and how they were considered in this study follow:

(i) Through which disciplinary lens (educational, sociological, anthropological, medical, etc.) would the researcher approach the narratives? The disciplinary lens of this study was education, specifically relational teaching within a K–12 public school system. Knowing the researcher’s disciplinary stance is an important consideration in how they come to the research (Chase, 2018). As qualitative research, NI “sets the researcher as the data collection instrument” (Bourke, 2014, p. 2); the meaning made from each story shared by participants—and the importance attached to the storied experiences brought forth by participants—was also through the lens of the researcher. The beliefs and values of the researcher impacted what is noticed, heard, and attended to. The researcher’s ontology, “how I perceive the world, how [I] perceive truth and reality, which includes principles or standards of behaviour, and. . . what is important in life” (Witsel & Boyle, 2017, p. 156) was also important. The researcher’s positioning determined the space of listening: what was heard and how it was heard.

(ii) What kinds of knowledge might be accessed through the personal narratives of the participants? The kinds of knowledge shared in the stories of the participants were those that helped bring about understanding of the experience of becoming a teacher—knowledge of being. Knowledge of pedagogical relationships in the context of teaching life also came to light. Moving back and forth in time, exploring storied experiences of the past, reliving stories through retelling, and revising understandings of the self, all enabled the researcher and participants to see the stories in new contexts. The knowledge of the stories revealed insights into how experiences continued to transform teacher identity. In NI, the told stories helped explain experiences (Wang & Geale, 2015). Thus, the stories shared in this study centred around the emergence of teacher identity in relation to stories of the systems and schools in which participants lived their teaching lives.

(iii) What is the ethical stance of the researcher as a narrative inquirer? Caine and Estefan (2011) wrote that “research is a relational act” and “a narrative inquiry researcher is, in fact, a ‘relational’ researcher” (p. 170). Narrative inquiry is “a relational inquiry. . . that emerge[s] in relation with our life experiences, of living, composing field texts and research texts in relation with participants” (Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 81). Adopting a relational research stance meant the researcher treated the stories of the participants generously (Caine & Estefan, 2011): “Generosity in a narrative context requires honoring the relational spaces that arise between the researcher and the participant and allowing for the relationship to develop and experiences to be told and lived” (p. 696). This study was conducted as an equal partnership between researcher and participants. Being both researcher and participant also meant sharing power. During the research conversations, power was held by the group.

(iv) How would the narrative data be analyzed, understood, and shared? Narrative analysis was used to interpret and understand the stories that emerged through the research conversations to ensure the study maintained its commitment to the narrative community (Chase, 2018). Denzin and Lincoln (2018) put forth the idea that qualitative research allows for the use of “a wide range of interconnected interpretive practices” (p. 10). MacMath (2009) draws on this idea contending that the same data set be looked at through multiple interpretive lenses to better understand what is being explored. In this study, the collection and transcription of data throughout the research process and after each conversation was followed by narrative explication and interpretation of the experience. Using paradigmatic, constant comparative and narrative analyses (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Kim, 2016; MacMath, 2009), meaning was constructed from stories.

Despite expanding the study to include another methodological approach, this study was held “accountable to the community of narrative inquirers” (Chase, 2018, p. 550) by utilizing Thomas’ four questions to maintain the integrity of NI while bringing in AI to facilitate the telling of stories.

Appreciative Inquiry in the Study

AI was initially conceptualized as a four-phase framework by Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987, to explore the experiences in business environments, leading participants towards articulation of the positive aspects of organizational cultures. It evolved from the four phases to includes five phases: Define, Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny (Bergmark & Kostenius, 2018; Tschannen-Moran & Tschannen-Moran, 2011). As with other methodologies, the AI framework continues to evolve. Most recently, a sixth element—Deepen—has been added to the AI framework (Arora, 2021). Deepen was woven throughout the phases in this study, meaning the researcher utilized empathetic listening and heightened self-awareness “to create an altered concept of the self” (Arora, p. 85). In this study, an AI framework (see Figure 1), was a means to embed theory as an “enabling agent of social change”, and as an “affirmative form of inquiry” to guide participants in the generation of research.

Figure 1.

A diagram showing the Appreciative Inquiry framework used in this study.

While AI provides opportunities to uncover what is best of organizations and people by focusing on finding a positive core (Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2010), criticism has been levelled that it can be too positive, glossing over areas of challenge and even censoring discourse and stories that linger in the shadows (Fitzgerald et al., 2010); where there is light there is always shadow. Although the intent of AI is to bring forward what is best, researchers cannot ignore the uncomfortable sides of stories if participants are to share stories authentically (Verma, 2020). Fitzgerald et al. (2010) drew on a Jungian definition of the shadow as things one might “refuse to acknowledge” about themselves, groups, or organizations (p. 221). Openly exploring the shadow can create an honest space of reflection and provide an opportunity to consider stories of identity in a broader context—both those in the light and the shadows: AI brings what is good to the light and offers us a path through which we can also learn from the shadows. Philosophically, AI is not about the dichotomy of the positive or the negative aspects of life; rather, it is about inquiry into life and the search for deeper meaning, which sometimes might involve tragedy (Cooperrider & Fry, 2020).

When thinking about teacher stories of identity, it was important to know and acknowledge that growth can also germinate through challenging experiences. The counsel that AI is sometimes perceived as more attentive to the process than to the people engaging the process (Fitzgerald et al., 2010) was also something that the researcher in this study needed to continually consider. The Deepen element helped address the risk of privileging process and surface conversations by deeply listening and engaging in dialogue (Arora, 2021), to strengthen the reliability of the study. Thus, it was important to closely examine the stories told during the research process, both to determine if the stories warranted further exploration and to ensure that what arose from conversations was given sufficiently deep and rigorous consideration. Working through and deconstructing challenges identified in shared stories uncovered new and deeper understandings.

An AI framework provided a medium through which to think about how experiences can inform routes forward and challenge the status quo with liberating and emancipatory actions. Deficit ideologies are challenged when brought to light providing space for reimagined organizational narratives to emerge (Grant & Humphries, 2006). Whitney and Trosten-Bloom (2010) wrote, “When people realize they can and do make a difference in relation to others, they experience true liberation. . . Appreciative Inquiry. . . creates a context rich in relationship and narrative that becomes the path on which the journey to liberation takes place” (“Oppression to the Liberation of Power” section, para 4).

The use of AI in this study offered a framework through which to call forward stories of teacher identity. Throughout the AI phases, powerful and influential experiences that had shaped participants as educators were evoked and considered. The effects such experiences had on participants’ teacher identities were contemplated. Participants examined lived examples upon which thinking about identity as pedagogy was hinged. As AI is a participatory action research that is “cooperative and coevolutionary” (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005, “What Is Appreciative Inquiry?” section, para 4), together, through the conversations, a vibrant shared understanding was constructed by participants of the narratives of the NL system.

Methodological Intersections Between NI and AI

As indicated, marrying AI with NI as a means to engage with and study stories of educators has not been widely used in education research, however, the approaches intersect methodologically in many ways. Both are situated in constructivism: NI is based on the analysis of narratives—social constructions of people’s experiences (Smith & Sparkes, 2005); an AI principle is that reality is socially constructed through language and conversation (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005). Both methodologies are also rooted in continuity. NI draws on Dewey’s (1938/1997) theory of experiential continuity that brings forth the past, present, and future as elements in life experiences from “an emerging vantage point created by the unfolding of experience, with each subsequent situation offering us a novel perspective to look back on the experiences leading up to, and out of, an experience” (Clandinin, 2019, p. 131); continuity is embedded in AI as it gives consideration of past experiences (define), of how the present is influenced by the past (discovery), and of how we might imagine and shape a hopeful future (dream and destiny). NI with an embedded AI framework in this study, guided the conversations with appreciative consideration of past experiences, of how the present is influenced by the past, and of how we might imagine and shape a hopeful future. The following sections provide an abbreviated overview of how the individual methodologies were interwoven as methodology in this study.

Opening NI to the AI Framework to Tell the Stories

Telling Stories of Teacher Identity

An AI is localized and specific depending on the purpose of the study, the particular context, and participants (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005; Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2010). As Castle and Johnson (2018) suggest, AI is “guided by the emerging learning” (p. 63). In this study, flexibility in AI allowed for recursive reflections on conversations, reflections that were utilized to inform subsequent questions as well as the direction in which to guide the conversations. This strengthened the trustworthiness of the study in that the researcher could stay in any phase for extended time, returning to ideas to ensure they were rigorously explored and understood. The semi-structured interview conversations followed the elements of the AI cycle:

(i) Define Phase. This was the process of coming to the research questions, or what was to be explored. It included the researcher’s journey to the study, how the initial research questions were identified, consideration of the study’s context, and the process of participants situating themselves in the study. Narratively, in this phase attention was paid to stories that were prevalent in the NL system and situated our conversations within the continuity of stories lived in the past and present, and in shaping the future.

(ii) Discovery Phase. Participants reflected on the important stories from their early teaching that continued to nurture and inspire their teacher identity. During approximately one-hour, individual, semi-structured conversational interviews, each participant looked back at their early educational experiences and formative days in the profession to explore what they had understood about the role of teacher through the narratives of the school system into which they entered as new teachers. They considered how their teacher identities had informed the ways they entered the sacred spaces of pedagogical relationships.

(iii) Dream Phase. Participants began to think about how they would enter pedagogical relationships if their system realized the conditions that support the sacred space of pedagogical relationships. This phase spanned two conversations, each approximately 1.5 hours long. During these semi-structured group conversational interviews, participants reflected on grand narratives of the NL system as they understood them. They shared difficult system narratives that had been influenced by the historical context, current trends in education, and in cases, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sacred, secret and cover stories of teaching (Clandinin & Connelly, 1991, 1996, 2000) were named and interrogated. Acknowledging difficult stories, or shadow stories (Fitzgerald et al., 2010), rooted the conversations in the present so an imagined narrative for the system might be dreamed. Through personal metaphors that represented how pedagogical relationships would be described in the future system, participants also began to envision a re-storied system.

(iv) Design Phase. In this semi-structured, group conversational interview, which lasted 1.5 hours, participants had the opportunity to describe the system they envisioned. Using JamBoard, a virtual collaborative tool, participants contributed to a vision board, reimagining their system and the conditions that would support teaching as relational. In their imagined future, the stories of the system they designed, where students flourish, aligned with the way they envisioned the role of teaching and their teacher identity.

(v) Destiny/Delivery Phase. Finally, having envisioned a system they hoped to cultivate, participants had an opportunity to imagine themselves teaching in that system. Each participant considered elements of what would be personally required of them to bring the system they had collaboratively reimagined into reality.

The AI framework enabled rich discussion, with each conversation emanating from and deepened understanding of the one before. Guided by an AI framework, there was continuity in the conversations and in the phases, each one “an emerging vantage point created with each subsequent situation offering a novel perspective to look back on experiences leading up to, and out of, another experience” (Clandinin, 2019, p. 131). In each phase, elicitations such as videos and question prompts, invited participants to reflect and share stories of their experiences that had influenced their teaching careers and how they understood their teacher identities. Participants were also invited to share reflections on the sessions through an online participant journal, adding any thoughts and feelings encountered after the conversations, or bring up topics they wanted to further address. Each of the conversations were video recorded for transcription and were the main sources of data. Supplemental data sources included field notes that documented what was observed, heard, and felt as participants shared; the researcher’s reflective journaling about the stories told, retold, and relived; and photos and artifacts contributed by the participants.

What did the Interweaving of NI and AI as Methodology Offer?

In this study, the interweaving of NI and AI was appropriate for the research questions being explored, that being the influence of stories of systems, communities, and teaching that embed themselves in teacher identity and become pedagogy. The stories that teachers draw on can sometimes represent skewed beliefs about people or places and which require deep consideration and reflection. Narrative inquiry revealed what the participant stories communicated to them, and provided space to consider harmful narratives that live undetected in schools and systems, perpetuated through pedagogy.

Affordances of NI and AI as Interwoven

One significant affordance of the interwoven methodology was that narratives that might have been difficult to confront or that might present conditions in a school system and may have seemed insurmountable, were considered both as they currently existed and as they might be reimagined as shifting stories emerged.

Shifting Stories Emerge

The define and discovery phases of AI led participants to examine the stories that were influential on their teacher identities, and to identify that those same stories were prominent narratives in their schools and the system of which they were a part. As the study moved through the dream, design, and destiny phases, participants articulated stories that aligned with the beliefs and values they wanted to demonstrate in their teaching and to live in schools. These newly articulated stories demonstrated ideals that participants felt would create conditions for students to thrive. The shifting stories were summarized as moving from hierarchy to reciprocity, from technical rational to relational, and from status quo to equity.

Hierarchy to Reciprocity

Reciprocity is “a potentially transformational social relation based on acting ‘with’ and not ‘for’ others, decreasing traditionally hierarchical roles and replacing power with shared responsibility” (Dale, 2017, p. 64). In the stories participants drew on in the early phases, a system of hierarchy, rooted in the historical context of the system, positioned students at the bottom of a system with the least amount of input or agency. Each subsequent layer of the organization (teachers, principals, district leaders, ministry leaders) held power over the one below them. The re-storied system was based in an anti-oppressive teaching stance (Potts & Brown, 2005), and fostered trust, empowerment and efficacy (de Cruz, 2019).

Technical Rational to Relational

Technical rationality in teaching is when teaching is viewed as prescriptive, employing rational techniques (Sachs, 2000; Schön, 1983; Tan, 2020; Wen & Kim, 2016). The stories in this study that spoke of technical rational teaching involved high stakes testing (public examinations), scripted curricula, and heavy reliance on commercial teaching resources. Moving away from this view of teaching involved re-storying to see teaching as occurring within responsive pedagogical relationships where teachers would be guided by a moral purpose of children thriving (Fullan, 2001; Fullan and Quinn (2016)).

Status Quo to Equity

The story of a rigid system in which the actions of teachers and the entire system maintained the status quo was a difficult one for participants to confront. This story included beliefs about meritocracy and poverty, was deeply situated in the historical context of the study, and placed a great deal of blame for failures of the system on families. Re-storying this system narrative brought the conversation to equity and the understanding that equity “responds to the contextual pluralities, differences, and needs of students and teachers as individual” (Portelli & Koneeny, 2018, p. 138). In the reconsidered story, rather than placing the blame of failures of the system on students’ inability thrive in a system designed to serve a few, it shifted thinking to embrace system diversity as a strength and challenged schools to be places where all the contexts of students contribute to the lived complexity classrooms.

Purposeful Participation

An additional affordance of an AI framework within NI was that it allowed for purposeful participation on the part of the teachers. In this study, that purposeful participation was in the form of professional learning. Participants were learning about their profession, their practice, and themselves through the study. AI is a form of participative action research, thus there were opportunities for participants to embed the research into their professional practices. AI is a framework for the telling of stories that can guide qualitative researchers to explore stories as research with participants.

Limitations of Interweaving NI and NI

Interweaving NI and AI as a methodology to explore the stories still has limitations, which might be refined as it evolves. In many narrative inquiries regarding school life, the studies are situated in the school and examine the lived experiences as they occur. They are lived and told by teachers and students, and also understood by researchers, as life of the school is storied, and research happens during the daily life of the school. There is much merit to education research education happening at the site of its living. This research, however, was used to look at lived experiences from a distance.

NI Separated From Life Lived in School

AI removes the in-situ element of narrative inquiry, rather the stories of the study are those that are remembered, re-storied, and interpreted. The living of the stories in an AI was vicarious for the researcher and relived by the participant in the telling. This may be considered a limitation by some narrative inquirers, as the lived contexts and the ability to see the story from the lived perspective was removed.

Although when NI is expanded by interweaving an AI framework the stories are retold rather than investigated as they are being lived, this limitation is mitigated: an AI framework provides a space for participants to sit with and consider how the stories became embedded into their identities. As teachers, stories continuously live in pedagogy. Thus, exploring challenging stories in retrospect, venturing into the shadows of difficult stories, can allow participants to reflect and sense make about the effects stories might have on how students experience school. Moving beyond those stories further focuses the retelling of stories of teaching from the past, providing an opportunity to move forward, re-storying narratives in ways that might confront marginalization without blame or shame, thus creating more equitable conditions for students.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to describe a further evolution of narrative inquiry in educational settings, specifically interweaving appreciative inquiry with it. Using AI within NI is novel as a qualitative research methodology within educational settings. In this study, both qualitative approaches were seamlessly integrated to uncover the narratives teachers, from their common school system, drew on as identity and that informed their pedagogy. The study in which the methodologies were interwoven was shared as an illustrative example of the use of NI and AI. It drew on the common paradigmatic roots of the methodologies which provided a framework for educators to share and interrogate their stories of teaching and envision a system wherein such stories might be confronted and re-storied.