Abstract
This article’s five research exemplars were created using the narrative inquiry tools of broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying. After that, serial interpretation, an overarching analytical device, was used to derive shared meaning from them. These narrative exemplars, each accompanied by carefully crafted research notes, probe a theme relating to the movement of research findings to practice and vice versa, a process known as knowledge translation. Each exemplar includes teachers’ sense of knowing in context expressed in their own words. This directly contrasts with knowledge-for-teaching approaches where experts produce knowledge that teachers are expected to implement. Why knowledge mobilization questions were not initially asked is also considered. Rigorous examination reveals that the five narrative exemplars helped to propel teaching and teacher education in the direction of knowledge mobilization, albeit in different ways. However, neither the field nor the researchers and reviewers in it were ready to take up those questions. Still, the exemplars provide strong foundational knowledge as to how translational research might best be approached from a narrative inquiry perspective. The five exemplars elucidate what impactful knowledge mobilization narratives would need to include, along with the inquiry conditions needed for the movement of teachers’ in situ knowing. The vital role of narrative is also spotlighted.
Keywords
“Ask a different question—get a different answer.”
This article begins with Aristotle and the relationship he perceived between questions and answers. Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2004) borrowed Aristotle’s analogy for an editorial where she examined the knowledge base of teaching and declared that the answers we arrive at depend on the questions we ask. She asserted that “it is worth sorting out what kind of question is being asked, how research is being used, and to what larger professional and political agendas these are attached.” Having recently had my research treated as inconsequential, I wanted to more fully communicate what my studies conducted at the intersection of theory and practice reveal about teacher knowledge and the contexts within which their knowledge is produced and readied for mobilization. In many ways, this article responds to Zeichner’s (2007) call for accumulating knowledge from single studies to bring preservice and in-service teachers’ voices more prominently into teaching and teacher education.
This work features five research exemplars and analyzes them using serial interpretation, a tool I added to narrative inquiry’s interpretive devices. Each exemplar sheds light on moving from knowledge generation to mobilization, without a straightforward knowledge mobilization question being asked. I also query why I never directly addressed mobilization despite conducting research in its vicinity since my narrative inquiry journey began.
I launch this article with literature aligned with my research niche. An overview of narrative inquiry, including serial interpretation, comes next. Then, I introduce the exemplars and what I learned about translational research from each of them. I end with the contributions this overarching investigation makes to understandings of knowledge generation and mobilization and how narratives and narrative inquiry could directly take up future knowledge translation questions.
Literature Review
Translational Research
Translational research addresses the development, use, and sharing of research in ways that inform practice. Translational research entered psychology, social work, agriculture and education from quantitative medical sub-specialty areas (Doroshow & Kummar, 2014). For educators, the movement of knowledge occurs at the intersection where theory and practice meet. In education, translational research has only been approached qualitatively in the past fifteen years.
Knowledge Mobilization
Knowledge mobilization has to do with “the movement of available research knowledge into active professional use.” Unlike knowledge dissemination, which is unidimensional, knowledge mobilization is bi-directional and includes “intermediary agents and processes that aid in how ideas and concepts make their way into practice and policy” (la Velle, 2015, p. 460). For Levin (2011), knowledge mobilization occurs when communication takes place between educators serving two or more of the following functions: knowledge use, knowledge mediation, and knowledge mobilization. To Levin, practitioners like teachers are users and mediators of research knowledge but not generators of their own knowledge or knowledge mobilizers. Levin’s definitional ‘oversight’ raises perennial teacher knowledge issues, which return us to the thesis of Cochran-Smith’s editorial. It is essential that the professional role of teachers and the provisional nature of their knowledge be considered.
Exemplars
Drawing on Bruner’s (1987) view that story and argument produce different forms of knowledge and pulling on the contributions of Kuhn (1962/1996) in the philosophy of science and Mishler (1990) in medical research, Lyons and LaBoskey (2002) defended the use of narrative exemplars to show that preservice and in-service teachers know and that they know that they know. These exemplars provide “concrete examples … elaborated so…members of a relevant research community can judge…their ‘trustworthiness’ and the validity of observations, interpretations, etc.” (p. 20). Such exemplars, which refer to teachers and schools by pseudonym, share five characteristics. First, they capture intentional human actions that tell a story conveying teachers’ developing knowledge. Second, they feature people in contexts marked by tensions and conflicts. Third, exemplars unavoidably include other people. Fourth, teachers’ identities are implicated; and fifth, exemplars include different interpretations.
Narrative Inquiry
Connelly and Clandinin (1990) founded narrative inquiry. Simply put, narrative inquiry is “the study of [human] experience understood narratively” (Mello et al., 2016, p. 567). A more contextualized definition refers to “stories lived and told by individuals…embedded in cultural, social, institutional, familial, political and linguistic narratives.” (Clandinin et al., 2018, p. i) A relatively new method, it consists of school-based narrative inquiries (for example, Xu & Connelly, 2010) and autobiographical narrative inquiries (for example, Cardinal, 2020). Within each strand, the method is adjusted to fit each inquiry. This flexibility makes narrative inquiry “well suited to…the complexities and subtleties of human experience in teaching and learning.” (Metova & Webster, 2020, p. 1).
The Centrality of Experience
Grounded in Dewey’s (1938) theory of experience, narrative inquiry includes personal experiences, participants’ experiences, and the experience of engaging in research studies. It probes “what men [sic] do and suffer, what they strive for… and how men [sic] act and are acted up, desire, and enjoy, see, believe, imagine—in short, processes in experiencing.” (Dewey, 1958, p. 8 [italics in original]). Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) liken the never-ending storying and restorying of experience to “a changing stream…characterized by continuous interaction of human thought with personal, social, and material environments” (p. 39). This experiential stream is informed by temporality (time), sociality (social interactions) and place (location). Intertwined, they constitute narrative inquiry’s three-dimensional inquiry space.
Narrative Inquiry and the Commonplaces of Curriculum
Experience is captured via Schwab’s (1973) four commonplaces: learner, teacher, milieu, and subject matter. These curriculum commonplaces, which form the centerpiece of Schwab’s inquiry framework, resonate with narrative inquiry. Connelly and Clandinin’s original research questions were framed at the intersection of teaching (teacher, learner) and curriculum (subject matter) in schools (milieu). Hence, when narrative inquiry began, it was meant for the teaching and curriculum fields. The second connection is that the founders were steeped in Schwab’s scholarship (i.e., 1969) because Connelly was Schwab’s doctoral student and Schwab, in turn, was influenced by Dewey’s philosophy, among others. Clandinin and Connelly’s (1992) work on teacher-as-curriculum-maker stands as an extension of Schwab’s curriculum research.
Tools of Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry’s analytical tools of broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying have mostly remained the same over time, although its representational forms changed with Craig’s introduction of parallel stories (1999), story constellation (2007) and story serials (2020). Broadening sets the backdrop for narrative investigations. How studies are broadened is negotiated between researchers and participants. Burrowing digs deeply into lived experiences and uncovers hidden nuances. Finally, storying and restorying excavates how change happens. Gonçalves and Stiles (2011) maintain that when stories change, lives change. This demonstrates the power of stories (Morris, 2004). Also, narrative inquiry has an uncanny ability to illuminate general phenomena through individual experience (Charon & Montello, 2002), which makes ‘generalizability’ an ongoing research paradox with which narrative inquirers contend.
Serial Interpretation
Serial interpretation, a Schwabian catchphrase, is used as an overarching device that allows narrative inquirers to identify “encompassing idea [s]” (Schwab, 1954/1978) gleaned from “look [ing] across” (Clandinin, 2013) the curriculum commonplaces and the inquiry framework of multiple studies. This meta-level narrative analysis increases the explanatory power of the scholarship while still allowing individual experience to lead the way (Ciuffetelli Parker & Craig, 2023) through the stories featured in the serially interpreted narrative exemplars.
Five Exemplars of Coming to the Knowledge Mobilization Question
Narrative Research Exemplars
Note. Exemplars represent selected studies from my research program between 2006–2026.
Exemplar 1: Bernadette Lohle, Cochrane Academy
Exemplar 1 revolves around Bernadette Lohle, a New York-prepared and certified art teacher, who migrated to a southern state ∼25 years ago. It captures North-South cultural shifts, including her being called a Yankee. The work also shows how art as a school subject is misunderstood.
Bernadette’s campus, Cochrane Academy, was located in a school district that was one of the last to settle its desegregation order. The campus received a $1 million grant to develop its arts program and to spread that program to another school. However, its principal who was well-versed in the arts was replaced by a new principal who staunchly supported the mandated No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and described the arts as “fluff” to offset hard-nosed instruction.
From the outset, Bernadette and her new principal held different paradigmatic, programmatic, and pedagogical views. Bernadette knew that what she had pledged to do with the grant went far beyond writing lesson plans. But her principal advised her to “just write lessons” and strike the grant off “the to-do list.” However, Bernadette knew that: The writing of lessons [is] not the essence. It was the work that came out of it.… Teachers need to have passion to enter into the work; they need to experience the emotion themselves to be able to engage their students... They need to be attentive to what transpires… What happens is more powerful than any [lesson] could ever be. (Craig, 2006, p. 271)
Unexpectedly, the September 11, 2001, tragedy happened. To deal with the national crisis, Bernadette and her students created a ‘Shadows of New York’ mural and gifted it to the City of New York. The Cochrane faculty came to more vividly understand arts-based learning through the public example that Bernadette and her students created in the campus’s courtyard. The holistic mural making experience, in turn, contributed to the further “baking in” (Cochran-Smith & Reagan, 2022) of arts-based learning as the philosophical, ontological and pedagogical backbone of Cochrane Academy.
Bernadette Lohle also knew that the grant’s second thrust was to seed the arts program at Hamilton Academy. While she pondered how to influence that school, her principal and her had another heated exchange. Bernadette explained after-the-fact: There is something cold … being done here … the way… children are being manipulated, the way art is being controlled, the use of art for testing purposes… Life does not come down to a score on a standardized test. Through focusing on numbers, we are…missing the big picture. (Craig, 2006 p. 285)
This was Bernadette’s awakening to the fact that Cochran’s arts-based learning was being deliberately diluted. She noted that “…it was slowly chipped away by leaders who did not understand its relevance … who did not know what the vision was and thought that it was arbitrary.”
With this sad realization, some Cochrane arts-based teachers transferred to Hamilton while Bernadette and still others chose to open a new primary arts-based campus. Ironically, Cochrane’s principal retired after dismantling the arts-based team. Afterwards, Bernadette Lohle discussed what her in-depth grant experience taught her: There is something about the word dissemination…that is totally … wrong.… We need new ways to describe how ideas become shared. Perhaps then we could more ably understand…what needs to happen in order for teachers to share their knowledge in ways that are helpful. (Craig, 2006, p. 293)
Researcher’s Reflective Return: How Teachers Share Knowledge
Bernadette Lohle was the only educator in these five exemplars who distinguished between knowledge production and mobilization. She realized that the grant’s tasks would need to “create experience, not communicate messages” (Dewey, 1934, p. 104). While her principal favored “fix [ing]” teachers (Palmer, 2000) by providing them with lesson plans to replicate, Bernadette sought ways to augment teachers’ experiences by sharing the impetus to teach in arts-based ways. She inherently knew that “expressive objects seldom …come with …objectives of how to use them” (Jackson, 2002, p. 172). She furthermore intuited “that focusing on the objective only ‘snatches at the fringe of real life’” (Buber, 1937, p. 17). As for Bernadette’s principal, her technical rationalist mindset, a by-product of the heightening neo-liberal world view, prompted her to liken arts-based teaching to “superficial stuff” unworthy of teachers’ and students’ attention.
In sum, Bernadette’s cumulative experiences alerted me to the unacknowledged power of teacher knowledge and the challenges associated with its mobilization. This case ably reinforced the ontological understanding that field-based research ideally “arises from experience and… returns to experience for …validation.” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39). I furthermore came to know that investigating knowledge production and mobilization involves a great deal more than knowledge codified by the state (knowledge-for-teaching). It specifically includes teachers’ knowledge—through fueling their eros (passion) (Schwab, 1954/1978)—to engage in arts-based learning with their students and igniting students’ eros (passion) as the mural experience showed. The biggest takeaway point was that experience always sits at the core of knowledge questions and necessarily includes teachers’ personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1985) derived from doing, feeling, making, and being.
Exemplar 2: Cameron Day, Cochrane Academy and Hamilton Academy
In Exemplar 2, Cameron Day appeared in two high impact articles (Craig, 2009; Olson & Craig, 2009). The co-authored paper told of how the small stories that teachers live can become drowned out by high stakes accountability meganarratives, while the single-authored paper focused on the increased contestation in ten schools and the subsequent narrowing of the classroom space. Cameron was the in-service teacher in the single-case research and a representative teacher in the 10-school policy study.
Cameron Day was hired to teach mathematics at Cochrane Academy, the same school where Bernadette taught. I became introduced to him when he arrived as a beginning teacher. A year later, he asked whether he could be a research participant. Once invited, I visited Cameron’s classroom several times in addition to interviewing him.
Cameron, I learned, came from a family of teachers. I also came to know that he entered the Air Force upon graduation and did several tours of duty. In faraway continents, he contemplated his future. He said he “started noticing…things about [him]self and what kind of situations gave [him] the … most joy—and that was showing people how to do what [he did] well. And [he] would find people who could not understand something, and [he] would teach them….” (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 562).
When he was 23, Cameron’s Air Force commitment ended. He immediately entered university to study teacher education, based on the sense of vocation instilled in him by his family. A professor who similarly loved mathematics became his life-long mentor, alongside his father.
When Cameron Day applied for a teaching position three years later, he chose Cochrane Academy because: …when he saw the students [there]—it was a little noisier than usual, but what [he] saw was not…the noise of goofing off… but the noise of learning. [He] saw a lot of hands-on learning, a lot of collaborative group learning. A lot of fine arts and visual arts and a great deal of integration (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 563).
In his second year, Cameron followed his fourth-grade students into the fifth grade. After three years of teaching, he said that he was so enamored with Cochrane that “[he] could not imagine teaching [elsewhere]…” (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 563).
However, Cameron became concerned about his school district’s practices. As a white male married to a Latina female, he was perturbed that Cochrane was 30% Latinx but had only one Spanish-speaking teacher. The district seemingly met its post-desegregation quota by combining its Black and Hispanic teacher populations, which, to him, seemed less-than-honest.
Cameron’s other apprehension stemmed from his school. He was exasperated because he could never meet with his principal. Cameron’s associated worry was that the district’s focus was on student deficits. To him, school leaders were so caught up in enforcing accountability policies that they had no time left for faculty or students. They did not seem to know or care about what was going on with them (Craig, 2009).
When the chance to transfer to Hamilton was announced, Cameron grabbed the opportunity. He hoped Cochrane’s problems were solely attributable to its principal. Unfortunately, he was mistaken. He soon learned that Hamilton suffered from the same malady. Hence, he decided to leave teaching, not because of his high need students or the urban context, but because there was “no space for his small stories of success to be [shared] amid the meganarrative of accountability” (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 565) privileged by leadership.
Researcher’s Reflective Return: Knowledge Mobilization in Schools/School Districts
Revolving around Cameron Day, Exemplar 2 indirectly confirmed the “baking in” of the arts-based teaching-learning approach presented in Exemplar 1. Unfortunately, “the sounds of learning” that attracted Cameron to Cochrane were not enough to keep him teaching there or at Hamilton either. Cameron’s successes never made it out of his classroom because his administrators neither observed his teaching nor interacted with him or his students. The school and school district’s unidirectional implanting (Blacker, 1998) of federal edicts did not allow teacher and student successes to reach school and district leadership—even when Cameron’s sixth grade students aced the mathematics achievement test. Also, in addition to lacking respect for teachers’ knowing, doing and being, Cameron’s two schools and school district did not even attempt to establish a bidirectional flow of experience between policy and practice.
From this second exemplar, I learned that knowledge can be produced and readied for mobilization but it cannot be shared if teacher knowledge is not recognized and accepted by those in charge. Furthermore, such knowledge cannot move to others/other places if schools/districts do not welcome school and inter-institutional liaisons and create opportunities for cross-planting and cross-fertilization. This exemplar especially underscores the need for a future-facing mindset. Otherwise, educators are condemned to live in fear, given their school district had existed outside the limits of a federal desegration court order for nearly forty years.
Exemplar 3: Helen Macalla, T. P. Yaeger Middle School
The third exemplar features Helen Macalla, a white Physical Education (PE) teacher with 18 years of experience and how she used her practice to informally mentor J.D., a beginning African American PE teacher. Helen Macalla’s background is interesting because she, like Bernadette (Exemplar 1), accepted a teaching job in the southern U.S. when no positions were available in the north. Hence, Helen taught PE in her urban district in addition to designing an experimental PE program. However, she quit teaching when her school withdrew support for her new program. But a chance meeting with a former student in the pet store where she worked post-teaching changed everything. That student divulged that he may not have stayed in school if not for her. His words restored Helen’s enthusiasm for teaching PE and “the call to teach drew her back into the profession…” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 760).
Back on the job, Helen Macalla decided to informally mentor J.D. whose assigned formal mentor was a male faculty member. J.D. was experiencing challenges and was eager to learn from Helen. Early on, Helen told J.D.: “It’s all about the pearls. You make a pearl necklace. You add a few pearls each year…The strand keeps growing…Teaching is a strand of pearls…” Helen shared the same analogy with our research team, saying: “He knows: She’s not into pearls either, but it is a way to talk about pedagogy … Nobody wants to talk about keys on a chain … They want to talk about something… valuable ….” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 765) Afterwards, the focus turned to J.D.’s strand of pearls, on which Helen named two beads: I said to him, ‘Right now, you are …‘making a strand of pearls.’ Every year, you add something great to what you teach.’ I then said, ‘Well, …you made two pearls this year.’ J.D. said: ‘I did?... I said, ‘Well, you know your football thing…And our dance unit.’ I said, ‘Those are two pearls… Next year…you will tweak them … “
Teaching football and dance, among other activities, deepened J.D.’s knowledge, skills, and dispositions as a PE teacher. However, from a knowledge generation and mobilization perspective, an emergent issue arose. When the two teachers were conducting the final performance evaluation (teens dancing together), an unexpected thunderstorm caused all students on the outdoor field to return indoors. Because Yaeger had always been short of gym space and was located in a hot climate, four outdoor classes of students needed accommodation. The dilemma was that J.D. and Helen were legitimately teaching two classes in the gym. However, the unwritten rule was that the other field classes needed to be brought in safely where they would sit around the gym’s perimeter. However, J.D. and Helen wanted to evaluate their dance unit and barred the other classes from entering the gymnasium. The only alternative was for 150+ noisy teenagers to fill Yaeger’s hallways. This circumstance ignited a near-holy war among the teachers, necessitating administrator intervention. The result was that a written policy was instituted, which superseded the verbal agreement in place for decades. This development showed Helen Macalla’s unflagging commitment to mentoring J.D. in all aspects of his growth. She knew that if they did not evaluate the dance unit then, they would never be able to do it due to mandatory PE unit rotations (Craig et al., 2014).
Researcher’s Reflective Return: Role of Metaphors in Knowledge Mobilization
In contrast to the first two exemplars, this third one employs a central metaphor. The connection between pearls and experiences is striking because a pearl and an educative experience share four characteristics: they are plural
Exemplar 4: Korea Research Grant Team/Asian American Study Center Research Team
In the articles featured in Exemplar 4, the field was not pointing in the direction of knowledge generation and mobilization where qualitative research was concerned. However, these topics became more popular after Levin (2008, 2011), la Velle (2015) and others, including Connelly and Xu (2017), and Flores (2018), broke new ground. In short, a beginning accumulation of individual efforts, along with countries like Canada, England and Israel launching knowledge mobilization grant programs, is how knowledge use and mobilization expanded outside medicine and the quantitative research paradigm.
Early in Exemplar 4, two data pools were introduced: (a) a comparison study of U.S. and Korean PE teachers, and (b) a Study Abroad trip to China with preservice and experienced teachers. Serial interpretation, using the conventional narrative inquiry tools and the curriculum commonplaces framework, was used to inquire into them.
In the first data pool, seven publications were logged. Two involved collaborations (Craig et al., 2018; Oh, 2013) with all three authors agreeing that teacher collaboration was a major cross-cutting theme for PE teachers in both Korea and the U.S. Hence, we identified data on that theme. But JeongAe You and Suhak Oh compared how Korean teachers collaborate according to their years of experience whereas I emphasized that American teachers collaborate with whomever is on their grade-level teams. I took teacher collaboration as a given and concentrated on areas where American PE teachers collaborated (Craig et al., 2018). Conversely, JeongAe You and Suhak Oh’s culturally based interpretation of collaboration involved age and experience. This resulted in our co-authoring two papers on collaboration.
For the second example, I share a bit of the back story of ‘the pearl metaphor.’ JeongAe You and I both worked closely with Helen Macalla during JeongAe’s sabbatical year in the U.S. Thus, Helen had shared her pearl analogy with both of us–alone and together. Still, we wondered whether ‘pedagogy as a strand of pearls’ should be our paper’s focus. However, when we discussed Helen’s pearl metaphor with Suhak Oh, he agreed with the metaphor and “reinforced the…universal value of pearls across all cultures.” His defense of the pearl metaphor added heft to Helen’s description of pearls as “valuable” and made the topic worthy of becoming a stand-alone paper.
In hindsight, I now see Helen mobilizing knowledge through her repeated anchoring of J.D.’s and her experiences in the pearl metaphor. Suhak Oh additionally served as a knowledge mediator when JeongAe You and I questioned the metaphor’s veracity, and he fully agreed with letting Helen’s and our experiences lead the way (Ciuffetelli Parker & Craig, 2023). But at the end of the day, ‘Fishing for topics’ (Craig, You, et al., 2024) centered on where ideas for funded research come from, how they develop, and how researchers decide what is researchable, which mostly put knowledge mobilization outside our investigation’s scope.
I now introduce our second ‘Fishing for topics’ example. Behind-the-scenes stories among the co-researchers in the Asian American Study Center nine-paper data pool also existed. The first of our examples had to do with Rita Poimbeauf and I planning an article after we had conducted field work in China. Given Rita’s background as a principal, my knowledge of teaching, teacher images, and metaphors, and the fact that we both had travelled to China several times, we thought our first draft of Xiao Xu’s images of the principalship was strong (e.g., principal as teacher maker; principal as lead teacher). After sharing our work with Yali Zou, though, we learned that we had omitted Chinese culture. Hence, Yali added a third image: image of principal as agent of a harmonious learning community. She additionally informed us that the pseudonym for the school needed to be culturally appropriate. We all agreed on Hexie, which means harmony. Furthermore, Chinese educators are addressed as Xu Laoshi (Teacher Xu/Principal Xu). Thus, we added Laoshi throughout our prose. We also strategically replaced anglicized terms with Mandarin equivalents. These fine-point changes gave our article a ring of authenticity that was previously lacking. While we vigorously discussed how our ideas as researchers materialized, we did not, however, interpret our interactions as instances of knowledge production, mediation and mobilization, despite Rita’s and my extensive mediation of knowledge with Yali where the text of the final manuscript was concerned.
The second example from our second data pool was ‘What the West could learn from the East: A reflective analysis.’ Rita Poimbeauf and I risked falling in the Western-centric trap again. However, before we verbalized our thoughts, Yali Zou suggested that we write the manuscript from an against-the-grain perspective: What the East could teach the West. This shift deepened our analysis and made our article original. Resisting the status quo view of the East learning from the West, a globally accepted meganarrative (Olson & Craig, 2009), allowed us to side-step issues and to offer a fresh perspective.
Researcher’s Reflective Return: How Researchers Share Knowledge With One Another
While I disclosed that ‘Fishing for topics’ began as early as 2015 but that the article was not published until 2024, I did not reveal that the initial metaphor was ‘trolling for topics.’ However, that metaphor, while also teacher produced, did not work. It reminded reviewers of maligned individuals surfing the internet, not of fishermen reeling in fish. Reviewers also were shocked that more than one article could be produced for each data pool. Without reviewers’ understandings of the importance of metaphors to knowledge construction, the flexibility of qualitative research methods, and the recognition that narrative inquiry research never ends, our paper was doomed. However, by the time it was accepted the first time around (and subsequently lost), Gayle Curtis and I had replaced the ‘trolling for topics’ metaphor with the less catchy, less alliterative ‘fishing for topics.’ Of even greater importance was the fact that I added new concepts to the literature review and, just as consequentially, included serial interpretation to the article’s narrative inquiry method. “What spurred these changes?” readers may ask.
The short answer is chance. When we were editing ‘Fishing for topics,’ Miriam Ben-Peretz and I were concurrently co-authoring a historical narrative about Joseph J. Schwab (Ben-Peretz & Craig, 2018). Miriam had first-hand experience of working with Schwab’s student, Seymour Fox, whereas I had visited the Joseph Schwab archive three times. Our co-authored article blended never-before-accessed archival material with Miriam’s first-hand experiences of working with Schwab’s closest collaborator. Our novel approach, however, was not enough for one reviewer who suggested that we also add the history of ideas, knowledge use and dissemination, and links/linkages/interactivity to our literature review. When we did, our article was immediately accepted. It then struck me that a similar approach might work with ‘Fishing for topics.’ Bingo! This was the first of two excellent decisions we made to our final revised copy.
The second change was that we added serial interpretation to the methods section of the article. Earlier on, I had conducted a multi-level narrative analysis of the conduit (Craig, 2002) to capture how it played out with teachers in different schools. I was already acquainted with serial interpretation, but I had not yet conducted my funded research projects about teachers’ experiences of school reform and could not yet see that the field needed a broader interpretative tool. With the deepening and widening of my research agenda, I awakened to the need for serial interpretation. I saw—and I repeat here—how it enables discussions that “talk across” (Stone, 1988) teacher experience, the curriculum commonplaces, and the plotlines of stories from multiple studies. This second major decision also aided our article’s acceptance.
But questions still remained. Why did the two research teams agree to write the data pool article when only I had participated in both investigations? Why did my co-researchers not nix combining the research pools? Then, it dawned on me that I, too, had gone along with the cultural interpretation of collaboration, added another image to the principalship paper, and flipped the West-East association to assume a new comparative lens. Intimate scholarship (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2015) cultivates trusting relationships among co-researchers and participants. In fact, reciprocity transcends research partnerships to become a way of being and a way of life (Connelly & Xu, 2017). It also overcomes research challenges, which is something to hold on to when complexities complicate one’s research journey.
Exemplar 5 STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) Teacher Education Program
In the fifth co-authored exemplar (Craig et al., 2026a), we focus on the emergence of chain mentoring in a STEM teacher education program. In our interviews, focus groups and participant observation sessions, we traced each preservice teacher to their informal and formal mentors. We also pinpointed the topics they discussed. Two students, Norton and Sam, instantiated the chained effect of mentoring. We see the NSF grant Principal Investigator (PI) serving as Norton’s formal mentor, and Brendan, a preservice teacher mentor, being introduced as a peer leader. Preservice teacher, Sam, shared his leadership title. Brent also appears in Sam’s mentoring chain, along with Thomas, another informal preservice teacher mentor. A link to Anabel Rios, a former graduate and currently an in-service high school teacher, is included. Similar figures were created for everyone in the cohort and seamed together (Figure 1). Norton’s and Sam’s formal and informal mentors (Craig et al., 2026a)
To end Exemplar 5, we analyzed our participant observation notes and interwove them with other field-based data. The result showed all the elucidated linkages, connections and interactivity tying the STEM teacher education community together. Once again, Cochran-Smith and Reagan’s (2022) idea of a foundational attribute being “baked into” a program was foregrounded, with mentoring being the STEM teacher education program’s key attribute.
Researcher’s Reflective Return: Teachers’ Knowledge Networks
When Exemplar 5 was first introduced, I did not disclose that it was part of a three-part series on mentoring, which lends additional credence to the teacher education program’s “baking in” of mentoring. All three mentoring approaches were commensurate (Craig et al., 2024, 2026a, 2026b; Evans et al., 2022). However, the glaring omission was that none of them—especially the chain mentoring ones (there were two)—referred to knowledge mobilization, despite our identification of visible knowledge networks. “How could this possibly happen?” readers may query.
The first explanation is that our research team was convinced mentoring was the cornerstone to which the STEM teacher education program’s success could be attributed. We therefore wanted to learn new ways of approaching it than previously reported. A second explanation was that a new faculty member was hired and her late appearance in our matrix confirmed that our chain mentoring concept was valid. The third reason was that the mentoring and knowledge mobilization association had not yet arrived on our research agendas. That occurred later when ‘What matters for mentors as knowledge mobilizers: Are they easy riders?’ (Orland-Barak et al., 2024) was published. As an aside, Lily Orland-Barak and I chose the easy-rider metaphor to describe mentors who help beginning teachers become culturally responsive. Here again, a metaphor became a vehicle through which knowledge was shared.
Meta-Level Serial Interpretation
I now share meta-level understandings gleaned from the five exemplars culled from my extensive narrative inquiry journey. I begin with Bernadette Lohle (Exemplar 1) who disdained the word, dissemination, and the baggage accompanying it. She knew that she influenced Cochrane’s teachers first-hand, but she recognized that reaching Hamilton’s teachers required something other than an one-direction approach. Bernadette was convinced that teachers need to personally experience arts-based teaching and learning before they can professionally engage in it with students. Bernadette especially reinforced that showing and telling (curriculum implementation) is not good enough if one wants to prepare teachers who are curriculum-makers. Showing and telling must be accompanied by doing and feeling for curriculum-making to be authentic. Bernadette particularly stressed the need to “feel” arts-based learning. Cameron Day (Exemplar 2), a beginning/induction-year teacher who taught at both Cochrane and Hamilton, similarly discussed the “sounds of learning.” Both Cochrane teachers stressed how affective-aesthetic teaching dimensions must necessarily accompany cognitive understanding for high quality instruction to occur. This union keeps experience “whole” (Dewey, 1897). Furthermore, for teachers’ knowledge to travel, creating holistic conditions for it to move is also paramount.
Also, Cameron and Bernadette experienced administrative challenges. Both bemoaned their district’s iron-clad management system and deficit thinking model. These top-down approaches resulted in dictates endlessly funneling into their classrooms, while their outstanding teaching practices were unable to spread inside and outside their school. Hence, Exemplars 1 and 2 (Exemplar 3, too) offer keen insights into what causes teacher attrition and the teacher shortage because both experienced and induction year teachers left the profession in the exemplars. Without this meta-level serial interpretation, this research connection would not be identified and considered in the ontological flow of knowledge from practice to theory and back again.
In Exemplar 2, Cameron Day also gave voice to the isolation experienced by those new-to-teaching. He never mentioned a colleague with whom he interacted at either school, although he discussed other mentors (father, university professor). He had hoped his principal would mentor him in his school context in ways that his other mentors (me included) could not. His principal additionally could make certain that his successes were shared outside his classroom. It was unfortunate that Cameron’s hoped-for linkage with his school leader was missing. This ultimately brought about his resignation and departure from the teaching profession. This happened in spite of his enormous potential as a mathematics teacher, his deep connections with minoritized learners, and his lived sense of social justice.
In Exemplar 3, Helen Macalla’s story began somewhat like that of Bernadette Lohle. Helen had quit teaching when her previous school had ended her innovative PE program. Similarly, Bernadette left Cochrane Academy when she discovered the focus of her arts-based campus had been “chipped away.” Both teachers were victims of their own successes. Cameron Day (Exemplar 2) also left teaching because he longed for his students’ and his accomplishments to be recognized by those in charge. In all instances, serious blockages existed in the flow of knowledge between teachers and school/school district administrators. This meta-level serial interpretation underscores these glaring teacher attrition/teacher shortage-related issues.
In Exemplar 3, Helen Macalla naturally showed how metaphors work in knowledge sharing situations. Her case involved beginning teacher J. D. and herself. It showed how fittingly the strand of pearls metaphor was used to unpack teacher practices in an informal mentoring situation. The metaphorical pearls unearthed practices that otherwise would remain intangible, if not for Helen’s pearl metaphor, which sparked conversations about the intangibles of teaching between Helen and J.D. and also with our research team. Exemplar 4, ‘Fishing for topics,’ likewise embraced a metaphor that provided access to unseen matters. These included comparisons between funded research studies and movesthat co-researchers make. Also, reciprocity between researchers was unearthed. Thinking across studies also helped us to appropriately respond to reviewers’ critiques.
Following Sacks, I now see how Exemplar 4 could not break ground for others until our team members had come to terms with it ourselves. Each revision brought us closer to the central idea, but we still needed to respond to reviewers. Thankfully, a helpful reviewer from an unrelated manuscript unknowingly mediated the situation by articulating what was missing. That distant respondent removed a blockage we faced. The experience taught me that it takes longer for more inventive, complex research studies in the qualitative vein to be published because team members need to convince themselves and each other of their work’s integrity and persuade a host of reviewers as well.
Exemplar 5 involved preservice teachers enrolled in an innovative STEM teacher education program and their professors. Exemplar 5 used figures for information sharing, which is something not included in the earlier exemplars. One could attribute the figures to the shift to more data-driven research approaches, but also to the fact that a larger topic was discussed—with the manuscript word limit remaining the same. This also partially explains why knowledge mobilization questions were not initially addressed. The beauty of the mentoring manuscript was that it involved formal and informal mentors
While Exemplar 4, ‘Fishing for topics,’ was discovery research involving different ‘variations on a theme’ papers, Exemplar 5 was original scholarship featuring fine-grained evidence of each mentor-mentee relationship. We then used additional interview and focus group data to map knowledge links and, linkages. We took this approach to stay close to the preservice teachers’ experiences while simultaneously expanding the mentoring concept and adding our third conceptualization to mentoring in the STEM literature. However, we came up short because we did not take the discussion of the mentoring chains up-a-notch and conceptualize our mentoring matrix as a knowledge network featuring professors and students as knowledge holders/producers/mobilizers.
Conclusion
This article began with Aristotle’s relationship between questions and answers, most especially the necessity of asking the right questions to yield the right answers, an idea that Marilyn Cochran-Smith embraced in her discussion of the knowledge base of teaching. Cochran-Smith claimed that “it is worth sorting out what kind of question is being asked, how research is being used, and to what larger professional and political agendas these are attached.” (p. 114).
As I surveyed my serial interpretation of the five exemplars, I kept Cochran-Smith’s sense-making in mind. My research clearly falls in the teacher knowledge category, not the knowledge-for-teaching one. The teacher knowledge category, which began in the late 1980s-early1990s, approaches teachers as knowers and doers (and mobilizers!) whereas the knowledge for teaching category views them as vessels needing to be filled unidimensionally with expert knowledge to implement government-authorized curricula. This latter approach stands a better chance of government adoption and also attracts research funding, which is not typically the case with teacher knowledge studies that intentionally question accepted metanarratives through producing against-the-grain counter stories (Crites, 1971). A behind-the-scenes research agenda item for teacher knowledge researchers is the professionalization of teaching and the championing of teachers as holders, users and mobilizers of knowledge. The approach I have chosen respects “the primacy of experience” and skirts “the politics of method” (Eisner, 1988, p.15). Still, a political undercurrent unavoidably streams through this scholarship. For example, bringing quantitative research methods to scale is easier than experimenting with qualitative methods “which constantly test the foundation on which [interpretations] are made” (Sacks, 2024, p. 306). Also, in this research approach, hesitations and gaps occurred when my co-researchers and I returned to the ground of experience “until [we] discover [ed]… what sort of ground it was.” (Sacks, 2024, p. 285) That is partially why the research for Exemplars 4 and 5 dragged on. Yes, there were changes in research assistants, a foul metaphor, a lost manuscript, and the pandemic, but there also was information gathering from related studies and necessary consultations with other researchers. With this work, member checking took place more expansively, despite the studies relying on fine-grained details conveying “the richness and vividness of life” (Sacks, 2024, p. 270). Also, in the background, I have been cautious about the direction I take narrative inquiry as my contributions build on my advisors’ legacies. I and others know that our research method is pressing toward a bright future. However, none of us knows what that future entails. For example, who could have predicted the extent that false truths have become perpetuated? Who could have forecasted the degree to which metaphors would drive politics? And who could have imagined the near erasure of liberal education or the lightning speed at which artificial intelligence has advanced?
Still, when I returned to what was uncovered via the researcher’s reflective return statements, I recognize that my five, serially interpreted exemplars made significant progress toward knowledge use, mediation, and mobilization. In a nutshell, Bernadette Lohle (Exemplar 1) and Cameron Day (Exemplar 2) demonstrated how teachers share knowledge and how knowledge is, or is not, spread in schools and school districts, while Helen Macalla (Exemplar 3) provided a powerful example of how important metaphors are to teachers’ knowledge mobilization and use. Then, in Exemplar 4, studies co-conducted with JeongAe You and Suhak Oh (Korea), and Yali Zou, Rita Poimbeauf, and Gayle Curtis (China Study Abroad), illuminated how researchers share knowledge with one another. Finally, in Exemplar 5 (STEM teacher education program), a fledgling teacher knowledge network was elucidated, along with a sample sketch.
Having completed this comprehensive survey of my research program, I submit that neither my co-researchers nor I directly asked knowledge mobilization questions in the featured exemplars. Still, serious headway was made using teacher experience as a compass to create exemplars at five different research junctures. This raised a bevy of associated questions. First, did I arrive at this point because the founders of my research method tilled the ground for teachers’ practical knowledge, and my contributions mainly focused on teachers’ knowledge developments in context? Or, second, was it because knowledge mobilization has been a strand of research from a different paradigm altogether, one that deals with epistemological concerns whereas narrative inquiry involves relational ontology and takes feeling and doing into account? Or, third, was it simply because knowledge mobilization from a qualitative perspective arrived late in the field of education after narrative inquiry was an established research method? Or, fourth, maybe it is because my research method involves “discursive and belle lettristic” prose (Jackson, 1968), which typically does not attract large reading audiences that more technical topics in the knowledge mobilization vein do? (Craig & Flores, 2020). But didn’t Philip Jackson (2014) stress that researchers should “use every means at their disposal” to unpack classroom teaching and learning? These are only some of my remaining wonders about knowledge mobilization as a narrative inquirer.
Still, I do know that if I were to directly take up a knowledge mobilization question, I would need to expand the knowledge mobilization conceptualization in my literature review to include personal knowledge generated by teachers as being on par with the knowledge of experts (i.e., consultants, professors, curriculum leaders, policymakers). Furthermore, the bi-directional movement of teachers’ knowledge would need to be recognized so that teachers can inform leadership and policymaking in the same way that the latter inform teaching. These changes would be non-negotiable for me.
From there, teachers’ lived experiences would need to lead the way. To repeat, translational research arising from first-hand accounts would need to return to them for meaning making. Additionally, no dictates could determine the direction in which practice/research/policy needs to move without consultations with teachers. Also, shifts that occur would need to be traced to their sources, along with the on-the-scene/off-the-scene factors affecting their unfolding.
Like others, teacher knowledge researchers engaging in knowledge mobilization studies would need to provide fuller disclosures of their studies like I modeled in the researcher’s reflective return sections. Without amplified details, part of the narrative of knowledge mobilization is missing. Making this information known would call for more vulnerability and “truth telling” on researchers’ parts because false truths remain an ever-present danger (Zuboff, 2019).
Yet, despite the potential pitfalls of knowledge production and mobilization, an enduring quality remains, one that makes both fully reliant on narrative. It is the near-universal recognition that “texts age, theories become obsolete, but there is something that is continually fresh and ageless about experience and feeling...” (Sacks, 2024, p. 243). This is of prime importance. Carefully crafted narratives of experience and feeling, many informed by metaphors, are foundational to knowledge mobilization. This is a topic I will continue to explore as this is the first time that I have brought narrative inquiry research into conversation with knowledge mobilization. So far, this serially interpreted narrative inquiry has enabled me to look backward on my programmatic research and imagine what the next leg of my research journey might be. And, as I have repeatedly learned, “it is [all about] the journey, first and last” (Sacks, 2024, p. 438).
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Artificial Intelligence was not used in the writing of this article.
Consent for Publication
This is original scholarship and has not been published elsewhere.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.