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D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research San Francisco, CA:Jossey-Bass, 2000. ISBN 0-7879-4343-6, 211 pp.
The main audience for the book is anyone interested in learning how to do narrative studies and fight off the behaviorist/octopus in education studies. Behaviorists are said to look at just the behaviors whereas narrativists can only hear, record, and interpret the stories. These behaviorists make one attempt to resolve the duality they created, by treating behavior as the expression of how people express and live their life story.
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Readers will come away from this book with an appreciation of this important struggle in education studies between the behaviorism of Edward Thorndike and the pragmatist philosophy of experience of John Dewey. The authors invent metaphoric characters for each epistemology: behaviorism is the Octopus' with tentacles of rigor, precision, certainty, objectivity, rationalism, and empiricism strangling 'narrative-experience studies.' The metaphoric character for narrative studies is a 'lathe' which narrative inquirers use to craft a three dimensional object (their narratives), in the second and third parts of the book. The lathe metaphor is viewed as a 'neutral common ground' to explain narrative thinking along three dimensions: temporal, place and narrativist/social (p. 16). As a critical postmodernist I find declaration of neutral ground problematic. Readers will also be challenged to share the authors' skepticism about the domination of the octopus over the lathe's 3D narrative space, as the authors narrate their own narrative studies in education settings (as pedagogic examples) throughout the book. The question the readers will ask, is do the authors recreate the tentacles they have sought to avoid? The thesis of the book is embedded in the authors' narratives: the octopus, behaviorism, is a grand narrative whose tentacles are entrapping narrative studies in education (and other disciplines). The consequence is that the study of narrative histories of students becomes irrelevant and impractical in education thinking, training, and practices (p. 31). The solution to this hegemony, say the authors, is to not get seduced by grand theory.
The structure of the book is easy to follow. The first several chapters trace the origins of narrative inquiry in the social sciences. This is followed by chapters (4-7) for conducting fieldwork using the 3D model,...