Engaging In Narrative Inquiries With Children And Youth

Renowned scholar and founder of the practice of narrative inquiry, D. Jean Clandinin, and her coauthors provide researchers with the theoretical underpinnings and processes for conducting narrative inquiry with children and youth. Exploring the unique ability of narratives to elucidate the worldview of research subjects, the authors highlight the unique steps and issues of working with these special populations. The authors address key ethical issues of anonymity and confidentiality, the relational issues of co-composing field and research texts with subjects, and working within the familial contexts of children and youth; include numerous examples from the authors’ studies and others – many from indigenous communities-- to show narrative inquiry in action; should be invaluable to researchers in education, family relations, child development, and children’s health and services.

Renowned scholar and founder of the practice of narrative inquiry, D. Jean Clandinin, and her coauthors provide researchers with the theoretical underpinnings and processes for conducting narrative inquiry with children and youth. Exploring the unique ability of narratives to elucidate the worldview of research subjects, the authors highlight the unique steps and issues of working with these special populations. The authors address key ethical issues of anonymity and confidentiality, the relational issues of co-composing field and research texts with subjects, and working within the familial contexts of children and youth; include numerous examples from the authors’ studies and others – many from indigenous communities-- to show narrative inquiry in action; should be invaluable to researchers in education, family relations, child development, and children’s health and services.

This volume draws together scholarly contributions from diverse, yet interlinking disciplinary fields, with the aim of critically examining the value of narrative inquiry in understanding the everyday lives of children and young people in diverse spaces and places, including the home, recreational spaces, communities and educational spaces. Incorporating insights from sociology, geography, education, child and youth studies, social care, and social work, the collection emphasises how narrative research approaches present storytelling as a universally recognizable, valuable and effective methodological approach with children and young people. The chapters points to the diversity of spaces and places encountered by children and young people, considers how young people ‘tell tales’ about their lives and highlights the multidimensionality of narrative research in capturing their everyday lived experiences.

Narrative inquiry is based on the proposition that experience is the stories lived and told by individuals as they are embedded within cultural, social, institutional, familial, political, and linguistic narratives. It represents the phenomenon of experience but also constitutes a methodology for its study. At the heart of this methodology is relational ethics. However, until now the functioning of this key relationship in practice has remained largely undefined. In this book the authors take on the essential task of developing a conceptual framework for the application of relational ethics to narrative inquiry. Building on a corpus of more generalized research, this book is grounded in a multi-year study with indigenous youth and families. The authors describe their experiences of narrative inquiry, highlighting how relational ethics informed their negotiation of these research relationships. They also engage in a conversation with the work of philosophers who have guided their narrative inquiry to offer a more thorough understanding of relational ethics. Through this, and contributions from five further studies on a diverse range of subjects, a number of key points for successful relational ethics are isolated and expounded upon. This book is an invaluable tool for researchers and postgraduates engaged in qualitative research — providing clear and practical guidance on ethical concerns. It also extends the work of the authors’ two previous titles, Engaging in Narrative Inquiry and Engaging in Narrative Inquiries with Children and Youth.

In Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents, social workers, sociologists, researchers, and helping professionals share engaging and evocative stories of practice that aim to center the young client’s story. Drawing on work with a variety of disadvantaged populations in New York City and around the world, they seek to raise awareness of the diversity of the individual experiences of youth. They make use of a variety of narrative approaches to offer new perspectives on a range of critical health care, mental health, and social issues that shape the lives of children and adolescents. The book considers the narratives we tell about the lives and experiences of children and adolescents and proposes counternarratives that challenge dominant ideas about childhood. Contributors examine the environments and structures that shape the lives of children and youth from an ecological lens. From their stories emerge questions about how those working with young clients might respond to a changing landscape: How do we define and construct childhood? How do poverty and inequality impact children’s health and welfare? How is childhood lived at the intersection of race, class, and gender? How can practitioners engage children and adolescents through culturally responsive and democratic processes? Offering new frameworks for reflecting on social work practice, the essays in Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents also serve as a vehicle for exploration of children’s agency and voice.

In Engaging in Narrative Inquiry, Second Edition, D. Jean Clandinin, a pioneer in narrative research, updates her classic formulation on narrative inquiry, clarifying, extending, and refining methods. This updated edition looks at changes and developments in the field since the publication of the first edition in 2013, exploring how narrative inquiry explores human lives through a narrative lens that honors experience as a source of important knowledge and understanding. The book includes several exemplary cases with the author’s critique and analysis of the work. The following are new to this edition: New exemplary cases, including Menon’s autobiographical narrative inquiry as the starting point for framing a research puzzle and justifying a study, Chung’s account of a study that begins with living alongside participants, and a paper from Swanson’s autobiographical narrative inquiry An expanded discussion of the philosophical grounding of narrative inquiry An expanded discussion of relational ethics in narrative inquiry that highlights links to a relational ontology An updated account of the field of narrative inquiry that highlights future directions, including the necessity of response groups, and questions of responsibility and community The increasing interest in narrative inquiry as research methodology across disciplines makes this book an essential guide and an excellent text for graduate courses in qualitative inquiry, education and nursing research, sociology, and all courses in autobiographical and narrative research and inquiry.

Introducing key ideas of narrative inquiry, this is the first book to explore in depth the theoretical underpinnings of the methodology. The authors open up ways of thinking about people's experiences and their lives, which are situated and shaped by cultural, social, familial, institutional, and linguistic narratives. The authors draw on a range of theorists, creative nonfiction writers, poets, and essayists. The book is arranged into five parts covering a range of topics including: embodiment, memory, knowledge, wonder, imagination, community, responsibility, and place. Each section ends with a methodological discussion of their work involving refugee families with young children from Syria.