Faculty of Education, CUHK
Qualitative Method in Education Research
Lecture 3
Narrative Inquiry of Identity Construction of Teachers and Students
A. Narrative as Universal Device and Meta-Code in Human Meaning-making
Process:
1. Meaning of narrative:
a. In Oxford English Dictionary, narrative as a noun means
i. An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with
the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story.
ii The practice or art of narrative; narrated material.
b. Lawrence Stone defines narrative as "the organization of material in a
chronologically sequential order and the focusing of the content into a
single coherent story, albeit with sub-plots." (Stone, 1979)
2. The universality of narrative
a. “Man is in his actions and practice …essentially a story-telling animal.”
(MacIntyre, 2007, p. 216)
Alasdair MacIntyre contends that we understand “human action as
enacted narratives. …We render the actions of others intelligible in this
way because action itself has a basically historical character. It is
because we all live out narrative in our lives and because we understand
our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of
narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories
are live before they are told.” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 211-212)
b. Barbara Hardy indicates that "we dream in narrative, day-dream in
narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan,
revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative."
(Hardy, 1968, p.5)
c. Jerome Bruner signifies that narrative construal of reality is universal in
human cogitation. "We live in a sea of stories, and like the fish who
(according to the proverb) will be the last to discover water, we have our
own difficulties grasping what it is like to swim in stories. It is not that we
lack competence in creating our narrative account of reality— far from it.
We are, if anything, too expert. Our problem, rather, is achieving
consciousness of what we so easily do automatically. (Bruner, 1996, 147)
d. Hayden White underlines that "to raise the question of the nature of
narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly,
even on the nature humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate,
so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report on the way things
really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a
culture in which it was absent. …This suggests that far from being one
code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with
meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of
which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be
transmitted." (White, 1987, p.1)
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B. The Structure of Narrative: The Content of the Form
1. Barbara Czarniawska's conception: "A narrative, in its basic form, requires at
least three elements: an original state of affairs, an action or an event, and
the consequent state of affairs." In order to have these three elements "
become a narrative, they require a plot, that is, some way to bring them into
a meaningful whole. The easiest way to do this is by introducing chronology
(and then …), which in the mind of the reader easily turns into causality (as a
result of, in spite of). (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 2)
2. Hayden White's conception of narrative
White defines narrative as one form of representations of historical data,
which consists of the following elements
a. A list of events ordered in chronological sequence, i.e. an annal.
b. A central subject, such as an individual, a state, a nation, an ethnic
group, a religion, a university, etc., i.e. a chronicle.
c. The plot, which is “a structure of relationships by which the events
contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being identified
as parts of an integrated whole.” (P.9) “The plot of a narrative imposes a
meaning on the events that make up its story level by revealing at the
end a structure that was immanent in the events all along.” (p.20)
d. The closure, which usually implies moral meaning
“A proper historical narrative … achieves narrative fullness by explicitly
invoking the idea of a social system to serve as a fixed reference point by
which the flow of ephemeral events can be endowed with specifically
moral meaning. … (Hence), the chronicle must approach the form of an
allegory, moral or analogical as the case may be, in order to achieve both
narrativity and historicality.” (p. 22)
C. Life as Narrative I: Paul Ricoeur's Concept of Narrative Identity
1. Among all the objects in the world that we humans try to assign meanings to,
the ways we impute meanings to our own lives and our own selves are
perhaps the most significant topic that qualitative researchers should inquire.
Paul Ricoeur contends that we make sense of our lives by narrative. More
specifically, we make sense of ourselves by emploting our own experiences,
i.e. events happen to us and actions undertaken by us, into a coherent
whole.
2. Life in quest of narrative
a. ‘A life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not
been interpreted.’ (Ricoeur, 1991a, p.27-28) This interpretive "mediation
between man and himself" in Ricouer's terms is the process of "selfunderstanding." (p. 27)
b. In Bruners conception this self narrative is a form of self reflexion. "The
story of one's own life is, of course, a privileged but troubled narrative in
the sense that it is reflexive: the narrator and the central figure in the
narrative are the same. This reflexivity create dilemma." (Bruner, 1987,
p.13)
c. Emplotment: One of the cogitation devices we employ for self mediation
and self reflexion is emplotment. Emplotment can broadly be defined as
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“the operation of ...a synthesis of heterogeneous elements.” (1991a,
p.21) These syntheses of heterogeneous elements can be include:
i. Synthesizing multiple incidents and events into a story
ii. Synthesizing discordance into concordance
iii. Synthesizing flows of time into permanence in time or temporal
succession into temporal closure or even totality
d. Symbolic mediation: Another self-narrating device employed to make
sense of our life is symbolic mediation, i.e. attributing meaning or even
significance and essentiality to living experiences, life partners and the
life-world.
e. Narrative identity: It is by means of these acts of emplotment and
symbolic mediation that man finds and found his own identity. Hence, it
constitutes a narrative identity.
“I am stressing the expression ‘narrative identity’ for what we call
subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable
substantiality, impervious to evolution. This is precisely the sort of
identity which narrative composition alone can create through its
dynamism.” (1991a, p. 32)
f. Construction of the central figures of our own story into heroes: "It is in
this way that we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own
story, without actually becoming the author of our own life. It is true that
life is lived and that stories are told. An unbridgeable difference does
remain, but this difference is partially abolished by our power of
applying to ourselves the plots that we have received from our culture
and of trying on the different roles assumed by the favourite characters
of the stories most dear to us.’ (1991a, p.32-33)
3. The concept of narrative identity
a. "The concept of narrative identity …(refers to) the kind of identity that
human being acquire through the mediation of the narrative function."
(1991b, p.188)
b. Fundamental distinction of the concept of identity:
i. Identity as selfhood (ipse)
ii. Identity as sameness (idem)
c. Identity as sameness
i. Identity as sameness refers to two or more occurrences of things are
one single and same thing.
ii. Identity as sameness refers to two or more occurrences of things are
similar, i.e. bearing great resemblance and constituting of no
difference.
iii. Identity as sameness refers to “the uninterrupted continuity in the
development of a being.
iv. Identity as sameness refers to permanence in time. “All phenomena
contain something permanent (substance) when considered as the
object itself, and something changing, when considered as a simple
determination of this object, that is to say as a mode of existence of
the objects” (Kant, quoted in Ricoeur, 1991b, p. 190)
d. Identity as selfhood:
i. As the concept of identity is interpreted as selfhood, we take “identity
as uniqueness” or even “as an irreplaceable person.” (Ricoeur,
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1991b, p, 190) It basically replaces a epistemological question of
sameness with an ontological question of selfhood.
ii. “I here agree with Heidegger that the question of selfhood belongs to
the sphere of problems relating to the kind of entity that he calls
Dasiein (Being-there)and which he characterizes by the capacity to
question itself as to its own way of being and thus to relate itself to
being qua being. …In this sense, selfhood is one of the existentials
which belong to the mode of being of Dasein.” (1991b, p.191)
e. Ricoeur suggests that if identity as sameness is construed as something
“permanence”, while identity as selfhood is construed as irreplaceable
and permanent existence (i.e. being qua being and Being-there), then
he underlines that “having said that, "the self intersects with the same at
one precise point: permanence in time.” (p.192)
f. It is through narrative, its emplotment and self mediation that the
sameness-identity and the selfhood-identity can come to associate with
each other on the ground of permanence in time. This permanence can
be ‘coherence of life’ ‘narrative unity’, ‘durable properties of a character’,
and a ‘discordant concordance’. (1991b, p. 195)
D. Life as NarrativeII: Jerome Bruner's Concept of Genre in Self-Narrative
1. Jerome Bruner underlines that "stories are about the vicissitudes of human
intention." (Bruner, 1987, p.18) Accordingly, "story structure (especially self
narrative) is …composed of …an Agent, an Action, a Goal, a setting, an
Instrument — and Trouble. Trouble is what drives the drama, and it is
generated by a mismatch between two or more of the five constituents." (p.
18)
2. It is Bruner's conception of agent and agency in one's self-narrative that
resonate Ricoeur's suggestion that the narrator has become the hero of one'
own storyline.
a. The agent is the "empowered protagonist" (p. 19), i.e. the leading
character in a story who can alter course of events, achieve the Goal by
making full us of the Instrument and the Setting, in the process overcome
the Troubles, and to provide the story with a coherent or even happy
ending.
b. The agency is therefore referring to the project of actions deliberately and
heroically taken by the agent in the storyline.
3. The theme and genre of the self-narrative:
a. Bruner indicates that if events and the plots are the sequenced discourse
of the storyline, the self narrative should then require a "timeless theme."
By timeless theme, Bruner refers to "the transcendent plight that a story
is about," (p. 17) such as the thwarted ambition, uncompromising strive,
committed pilgrimage, etc. that we assigned to the course of our lives.
b. In the structure of narrative, genre can be construed as the meaning
implied in the coherent whole of the narrative. Genre in historical
representations, as suggested by Hayden White, can be categorized into
Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire. (White, 1973) While Bruner
citing Northrop Frye's claims that there are only four genres at work in
literary theory, namely tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony. (Bruner,
1996, p. 95) In short, in the quest of a narrative for one's live, one final
question a self-narrator must face is that "what genre is it fitted." (p. 18)
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E. Social identity as Narrative: Margaret Somers' Relational and Network Approach
1. As a historical sociologist Somers applies Hayden White's conception of
narrative to the study of the constitution of social identity, which should be
distinguished from the constitution of self-identity that has been explicated
so far in Section B above.
2. Sameness and distinctiveness in social identity: By applying the dilemma
between sameness and selfhood formulated by Ricoeur to the
understanding of self identity, social identity can then be understood as the
narrative that individuals construct for themselves in dealing with
membership and sense of belonging within and among social groupings
and categories.
a. Narrative of sameness: In order to identify with a social grouping, a
person must attribute at least one similar characteristic that both she
and other members of the social grouping shared. Somers illustrated in
her historical sociological studies that in order to construct the identity of
a social class or the citizenship of a nation-state, the social narrative
that members of the social class or nation-state in question must build
or forge is that there is a common situation and a common course
shared by members of that social community.
b. Narrative of distinctiveness: At the same time, members of the same
social community must attribute distinct differences that they do not
share with members of other social groupings. In the case of members
of the working class in the nineteenth century, they could have narrated
their distinct differences or even antagonistic relation with the capitalist
class as the Karl Marx himself narrated.
3. The concept of social narrativity
Social narrativity is “concepts of social epistemology and social ontology.
(It)… posits through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and
make sense of the social world, and through which we constitute our social
identity. It matters… that we come to be (usually unconsciously) who we are
(however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by our locations in social
narrative and networks that rarely of our own making.” (Somers, 1994, p.5859)
a. Four dimensions of narrativity
i. Ontological narratives: Ontological narratives "are the stories that
social actions use to make sense of ― indeed, in order to act in ―
their lives. Ontological narratives are used to define who we are; this
in turn is a precondition for knowing what to do. This 'doing' will in
turn produce new narrative and hence new action; the relationship
between narrative and ontology is processual and mutually
constitutive." (Somers, 1994, p. 61)
ii. Public narratives: Public narrative are those narratives attached to
cultural and institutional formations larger than the single individual,
to intersubjective networks or institutions, however, local or grand,
micro or macro ― stories about American social mobility, the
'freeborn Englishman,' the working-class hero, and so on. Public
narratives range from the narratives of one's family, to those of the
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workplace (organizational myth), church, government, and nation."
(p. 62)
iii. Conceptual narrativity: "These are the concepts and explanations
that we construct as social researchers. Because neither social
action nor institution-building is produced solely through ontological
and public narratives, our concepts and explanations must include
the factors we call social forces ― market patterns, institutional
practices, organizational constraints.
iv. Metanarrativity: It "refers to the 'master-narratives' in which we are
embedded as contemporary actors in history and as social
scientists. …These narratives can be the epic dramas of our time:
Capitalism versus Communism, the Individual versus Society, and
Barbarism/Nature versus Civility. They may also be progressive
narratives of teleological unfolding: Marxism and the triumph of Class
Struggle, Liberalism and the triumph of Liberty, the Rise of
Nationalism, or of Islam." (p. 63)
b. Component of social narrativity
i. Relationality of parts
ii. Selective appropriation
iii. Temporality, sequence and places,
iv. Causal emplotment
F. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization in Risk Society: Bridging the
Subjectivity with Objectivity in Identity Construction
1. The process of individualization
a. “Modernization does not just lead to the formation of a centalized state
power, to concentrations of capital and to an ever more tightly woven
web of division of labor and market relationship, to mobility and mass
consumption, and so on. It also leads …to a triple ‘individualization’:
disembedding, removal from historically prescribed social forms and
commitments in the sense of traditional contexts of dominance and
support (the ‘liberating dimension’); the loss of traditional security with
respect to practical knowledge, faith and guiding norms (the
‘disenchantment dimension’); and …re-embedding, a new type of
social commitment (the ‘control’ or ‘reintegration dimension’). (Beck,
1992, p. 128)
Life
Situation
(objectivity)
Consciousness/
Identity
(subjectivity)
Liberation (Disembedment)
Loss of Stability
Reintegration (Re-embedment)
b. Beck’s definition of individualization: “‘Individualization’ means, first, the
disembedding and, second, the ‘re-embedding’ of industrial society
ways of life by new ones, in which the individuals must produce, stage
and cobble together their biographies themselves. Thus the name
‘individualization’, disembedding and re-embedding …do not occur by
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chance, nor individually, nor voluntarily, nor through diverse types of
historical conditions, but rather all at once and under the general
conditions of the welfare in developed industrial labour society, as they
have developed since the 1960s in many Western industrial countries.”
(Beck, 1994, p.13)
c. Zygmunt Bauman’s definition of individualization: “’Individualization’
consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a task and
changing the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and
for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their
performance. ….Human being are no more ‘born into’ their
identities. … Needing to become what one is is the feature of modern
living - and of this living alone. …Modernity replaces the heteronomic
determination of social standing with compulsive and obligatory selfdetermination.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 31-2)
d. Institutionalized ‘beds’ - identity bases - for the re-embedment of
modern individuals
i. ‘Beds’ in capital market, e.g. occupations, professions, social-class
positions, etc.
ii. ‘Beds’ in institution of marriage and family, husband, wife, father,
mother, etc.
iii. ‘Beds’ in modern political arenas, e.g. citizens, members of new
social movements, such as environmentalists, feminist, antigloabizationists, etc.
2. Individualization in Information Age
a. “What distinguished the ‘individualization’ of yore from the form it has
taken in ‘risk society’ …. No ‘beds’ are furnished for ‘re-embedding’, and
such beds as might be postulated and pursued prove fragile and often
vanish before the work of ‘re-embeddment’ is complete. There are rather
‘musical chairs’ of various size and style as well as of changing numbers
and positions, which prompt men and women to be constantly on the
move and promise no ‘fulfilment’, no rest and no satisfaction of ‘arriving’,
of rearching the final destination, where one can disarm, relax and stop
worrying.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 33-34)
b. The rise of networked individualism and cyber-balkanization
“Networked individualism is a social pattern, not a collection of isolated
individuals. Rather, individuals build their networks, on-line and off-line,
on the basis of their interests, values, affinities, and projects.” (Castells,
2001, p. 131)
G. Narrative Identities of UK Teachers in Education Reforms: Peter Woods and
others' Studies of Teachers
1. Application of Anthony Giddens' concept of Self-identity
a. Giddens defines “self as reflexively understood by the person in terms
of her or his biography.” (Giddens’ 1991, p. 53)
b. Identity, according to Giddens, indicates a person’s sense of “continuity
across time and space.” (ibid)
c. Self-identity, therefore, can be defined as a sense of “continuity as
interpreted reflexively by the agent.” (ibid) More specifically, a person
with a reasonably stable sense of self-identity is, therefore, the one with
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“the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual’s
biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the dayto-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate
events which occur in the external world, and sort them out into ongoing
‘story’ about the self.” (Giddens, 1991, p. 54) In short, self-identity can
be discerned as coherent and continuous narrative one imputed to
oneself.
d. Constituents of self-identity: A stable self-identity, i.e. coherent and
continuous self narrative, would compose the following attributes
i. Ontological security: “A stable sense of self-identity presupposes
the … elements of ontological security - an acceptance of the things
and of others.” (ibid) The sense of ontological security implies that a
person has to extend beyond self-reflexion and connects to her or
his environments, both physical and social. In turn, it will generate
both sense of trust and bondage with the physical and social
environments.
ii. Trust: Trust can be construed as the confidences and expectations
that a person invested on particular relationships with social and
physical environments. It is generally evolved from the positive
feedbacks obtained by the person in the particular relationships.
iii. Bondage: As the positive feedback generated from a relationship
with a human aggregate accumulated, the person involved will
develop strong sense of belonging to it and in turn constitute a social
bondage. As a result, a “social identity” develops.
2. Education reform as change in conceptual, public and self identity of
teachers
a. Teachers' Plowden identity (1970s and 1980s)
i. Powden Report (Central Advisory Council for Education In English,
1967) is an education Reform blueprint passed and implemented by
the Labour government at the end of the 1960s.
ii. The Report embodied most of the education ideas, values and
practices of a child-centred, humanistic and egalitarian schooling
system (Carlye and Woods, 2002, p. 138-139)
b. The Ofsed's identity
i. Ofsed (Office for Standards in Education) was the administrative arm
set up by the Conservative government in 1992 as part of the
liberalitarian education reform initiated by Margaret Thatcher's and her
government since 1988.
ii. Ofsed embodied the education values and practices of an outputbased, managerial-standardized and market-driven schooling system
(Carlye and Woods, 2002, p. 138-139)
c. Caught between the Powden self-identity and the Ofsed public or even
meta-narrative, English teachers experienced discontinuity and
incoherence in the narratives of their professional-teacher identity.
3. The loss of emotional security (Carlyle & Woods, 2002)
a. Loss of emotional skills: Inability of delivering emotional services of
understanding and empathy, motivation and encouragement, …
b. Loss of emotion regulation: Inability of controlling, regulating and
recovering from emotional stress
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c. Loss of positive emotional experiences: Deprived of heart-lifting and
satisfying experiences in teaching
d. Emotional estrangement: Fall into emotional traps of indifference and
apathy
4 Feeling of betrayal
a. “Betrayal is the intentional or unintentional breach of trust or the
perception of such a breach.” (Hargreaves, 2002, p. 397)
b. Interpersonal betrayal: It refers to a breach of trust by partners in a
human encounter. As in the case of teaching, teachers may feel betrayed
by students, co-teachers, school administration, and/or the government
and its policy
c. Self betrayal: It refers to a breach of trust on one’s self-identity and/or a
breach of a fundamental value one cherished
i. Guilt is a form of self betrayal of some normative codes one identified
with.
“Guilt is anxiety produced by the fear of transgression: where the
thoughts of activities of the individual do not match up to expectations
of a normative sort.” (Giddens, 1991, p. 64)
ii. Shame is another form of self betrayal, which upsets the status quo of
the self and/or disrupts the coherent narrative of one’s identity.
“Shame bears directly on self-identity because it is essentially anxiety
about the adequacy of the narrative by means of which the individual
sustains a coherent biography.” (Giddens, 1991, p. 65)
Additional References
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and society in the late
modern age. Cambride: Polity Press.
Hardy, Barbara (1968) “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach Through
Narrative.: Novel 2: 5-14.
Hargreaves, Andy (2002) Teaching and betrayal. Teachers and Teaching: Theory
and Practice Vol.8 (3/4): 393-407.
Stone, Lawrence (1979) "The Revival of Narrative." Past and Present, No. 85,
Pp.3-24.
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