2006/12/22 by D. Jean Clandinin, Debbie Pushor, Anne Murray Orr
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Digital Storytelling and Education #Education and Critical Thinking Development #Teacher Education and Leadership Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/0022487106296218
openalex publication_date 2006/12/22 · crossref created 2006/12/22 · crossref issued 2007/01/01 · crossref published 2007/01/01 · crossref published-online 2007/01/01 · crossref published-print 2007/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/05/01 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators. However, this appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and disadvantages. Some assume narrative inquiries will be easy to design, live out, and represent in storied formats in journals, dissertations, or books. For the authors, though, narrative inquiry is much more than the telling of stories. There are complexities surrounding all phases of a narrative inquiry and, in this article, the authors pay particular attention to thinking about the design of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’ and teacher educators’ own practices. They outline three commonplaces and eight design elements for consideration in narrative inquiry. They illustrate these elements using recently completed narrative inquiries. In this way, the authors show the complex dimensions of narrative inquiry, a kind of inquiry that requires particular kinds of wakefulness.