Narrative Inquiry as a Social Justice Practice

Introduction

We, a student and two professors, collectively explored the unique nature of our graduate course entitled Narrative Pedagogy as Social Justice. Sumer was a student, while Vera and Janice were co-instructors. In this course, we all experienced personal transformation through relationally engaging in difficult dialogue. We now wonder, how do we create classroom spaces where dialog about difficult topics can begin-a space where students and faculty can engage in inquiry?

Our research focused on this unique graduate course, in which professors and students came together to inquire into difficult issues that we as a class were facing and the ways we relationally created and sustained inquiry over the duration of the course. Through our exploration, we seek to remake the academy by hearing diverse voices and creating classroom counterspaces where untold stories are heard and dialogue begins.

Now, after the course has ended, we seek to characterize and understand more of the lived process of narrative pedagogy as a social justice practice-the heart of our course content. In coauthoring this article, we sat together again at a proverbial table, each bringing her own experiences and inquiring into the dialogue alongside one another.

As we engaged in this reflective inquiry, we attended to ways narrative inquiry guided our pedagogy. Seeking to make visible core narrative inquiry pedagogical processes to contribute to conversations of humanizing the academy by dismantling practices of inequity, we explored five ways this pedagogy interrupts dominant narratives in the academy:

1. Valuing "personal practical knowledge" (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) alongside disciplinary content knowledge;

2. Telling and retelling stories of experience in a negotiated process shaped and experienced in a community instead of in isolation;

3. Continuously negotiating relational spaces;

4. Sitting with, and thinking narratively with, stories, which shapes a dynamic interchange of relational understanding and sharing between professors and students; and

5. Engaging in collective work, for the purposes of humanization within the academy, for both students and professors.

A Field Note

In the following field note, Sumer reflected on one typical day in the course:

Slowly, students and professors in the circle shared their distant and sometimes more intimate experiences in relation to the connections between racism and sexual exploitation of women, just one of the many difficult topics-not one...