Narrative Inquiry: Measuring Student Progress Through Narrative
Teaching-Focused Observation
Being at the helm of a college classroom, especially an English classroom, affords teachers the unique opportunity to interact with varied personal narratives. As academia, and the world at large, strives, in the words of Sharon McGee, “to put front and center the conditions and needs of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and underrepresented of our society in order to strive for social, political, and economic change,” the need for narrative inquiry becomes increasingly clear. Through narrative inquiry, not only can we gain valuable information about the learning trends of a classroom on the whole, but we are also able to encourage the underrepresented voices of students within the academy.
At Western Washington University, the English 101 curriculum is inherently multimodal and student focused. Our students interact with web texts, conduct experiments, and create posters for public showcases that encourage connection with our academic communities. This approach towards English 101 has been very successful, and there has been largely positive feedback from students regarding their experience. However, given the fast paced nature of the quarter and the shifting, multimodal qualities of the assignments that we ask them to tackle, it often feels as though students lose connection to their personal literacy narratives and have a difficult time seeing how these disparate projects connect – we jump from literacy narrative to the poster project, from private to partner work, and from the poster genre to the web text genre quite quickly over the ten week quarter.
I would like to observe, through narrative inquiry and the return to a central text for grounding, how we can empower students to improve literacy across genres and become more engaged with their own personal, political, and cultural becoming in the world. I want to observe how expanding the literacy narrative project already in the curriculum improves student literacy across mediums and how it encourages meaningful engagement with their research across disciplines.
Previous Scholarly Discourse Within Writing Studies
Narrative Inquiry is an important and evolving field within writing studies. There is already an array of intriguing previous scholarship surrounding the discipline. Narrative inquiry promises to empower student voices while also providing benchmarks and information to look at across time and demographics. The information gleaned from narrative inquiry can act as a powerful tool for socially progressive research within (and outside of) the academy. As a teacher, it is also a powerful tool for observing student engagement and progress throughout the curriculum.
The main influence for this observational approach comes from Joanne Addison. Although I consulted several other sources while creating this project, this was the springboard from which I launched. I also gained valuable information from Sharon McGee’s article, “Practicing Socially Progressive Research: Implications for Research and Practice.” Further along, an interesting article by Gillian Steinberg titled, “Literature and Influence: A New Model for Introductory Literature Courses” helped me solidify my plans to return to a single text throughout the quarter. While her article focuses on an introductory literature course, I would argue that it has good information for an English 101 class as well. And, finally, in an effort to understand the concepts at play within the field of narrative inquiry, I used portions from Kathleen Wells scholarship, “Narrative Inquiry,” to ground myself while moving forward.
Practical Methods and Observational Milestones
First and foremost, my goal is to increase student engagement and buy-in to the process of narrative inquiry, to the process of sharing their own individual voice. With that in mind, I want to create an atmosphere around the added writing work that is engaging and doesn’t just feel like another piece of homework that they have to crank out for the teacher. I would like to expand the number of literacy narratives, and I would like to have them dive into different aspects of their own narrative journey throughout the quarter. In order to bolster their understanding of the project, the central text that I would like to revisit throughout the quarter is a TED talk by Diana Moreno entitled, “Real Talk: Mapping our Identities Through Personal Narrative.” This talk does a wonderful job of highlighting many of the key elements that my project hopes to address. As well, starting with a text that is multimodal will key students into the overall theme and approach towards literacy that we encourage in our English 101 curriculum.
As aforementioned, I would like to avoid this project coming with an inordinate number of rules. The existent literacy narrative, project one in the curriculum, will be enough of a primer surrounding the genre, and I will adapt the rubric to cover the additional two narratives that I would like them to write throughout the quarter. I would demote project three in exchange for this second written narrative, and I will make the partner pre-proposal email more of a class activity. The second narrative they will write, which will be a snapshot of a moment they pinpoint that helped to solidify their own personal identity outside of school, will carry a title from the TED Talk as opposed to the Deborah Brandt piece, and the portrayal of literacy sponsorship will be dropped from the rubric. This will effectively lower the total point count while keeping in place the solid guidelines from project one.
Finally, I would like to present the third narrative, a snapshot from the academic work that they have done this quarter that helped to solidify their identity as college students, as an optional extension project. While not completing the first and second narratives will incur penalty points, the completion of all three, satisfactorily, will win them an extra forgiveness point. As we have lowered the contract grade and made the gap towards an “A” larger, I believe that this will be a popular choice to boost their grade. I think that this in and of itself will provide useful data as well. Did the students who chose to complete all three make more progress in their writing skills? Does this show an already existent engagement with writing, or, does it display an increased engagement throughout the quarter? I hope that by keeping the form similar but changing the content of the additional narratives, it will give me, as the instructor, the chance to observe the type of writing progression and engagement throughout the quarter that this narrative inquiry prizes. Similarly, the third narrative will carry a similar rubric to first two, however, it will be like the other extension projects in that they will have to cover their plans for it with me during midterm conferences.
Data Gathering
Admittedly, my pedagogical research falls more into the observational category as opposed to the data driven category. Given that the changes to the curriculum surrounding this will not involve divulging or sharing their personal information and instead give me more of a narrative context for their writing progress and engagement, I don’t feel the need to do an informed consent form. That being said, I would like to implement data gathering in other ways outside of analysis of the proposed triplet of narratives and attention to the central text. Primarily, I hope to assess their individual engagement and progress through more one-on-one conferences and in class free writes.
Over the first week I plan on holding short individual conferences. These conferences will be a good opportunity to show them where my office hours are held, to connect and start building rapport on a more personal level, and to get an idea of their initial investment and engagement with the course. I hope that by meeting with them for a guaranteed three conferences, I will be able to not only glean the type of information I need, but, hopefully, be able to underscore their own progress and empower them to take their personal, academic, and creative voice seriously through English 101 and beyond. While I hope to use narrative inquiry to increase learning and engagement, ultimately, I hope that this curriculum (these slight tweaks included) will open their eyes to the power of their own stories. The proposed changes to the schedule are somewhat minor in the scheme of things, but, as the engineer behind the curriculum wisely advised, I chose just one thing at a time to change after just recently teaching the whole curriculum over the first quarter.
Citations
Addison, Joanne. “Narrative As Method and Methodology in Socially Progressive Research.”
Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research,
edited by Katrina Powell and Pamela Takayoshi, Hampton Press Inc., 2012, 373-383
Joanne Addison approaches narrative inquiry and its efficacy in this article. She draws heavily from her experiences as a foster parent, and that narrative thread itself tracks wonderfully throughout the piece. She utilizes her experience as a foster parent to drive home the importance of socially progressive research through narrative inquiry. This means, for Addison, including multiple written viewpoints and narratives to provide context for inquiry. She draws heavily on the work of sociolinguists William Labov and Joshua Waletzky to bolster her position. Labov and Waletzky’s research concerns narrative analysis. They argue that it is important to encourage the narrative work of real people rather than just the “expert storytellers” of our time. After attending to this prior scholarship, Addison makes a distinction between narrative inquiry and narrative analysis. Narrative inquiry, she argues, focuses more heavily on empirical evidence gained from the provided information in personal narratives. These details give context to events, and they help to reprioritize attention towards underrepresented and marginalized voices, which, is ultimately one of the driving motivations behind the type of socially progressive research she encourages.
McGee, Sharon. “Practicing Socially Progressive Research: Implications for Research and
Practice.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible
Research, edited by Katrina Powell and Pamela Takayoshi, Hampton Press Inc., 2012, 373-383
In this article, Sharon McGee delves into the implications surrounding socially progressive research. McGee contends that, “to conduct socially progressive research is to put front and center the conditions and needs of the marginalized, disenfranchise, and underrepresented of our society in order to strive for social, political, and economic change.” She covers several components including: institutional review boards, institutional review boards’ change of scope, working with the system to make the system work, and, finally, a section on working toward the future. She covers the origins or review boards the necessary creation of the Nuremburg code after atrocities that Nazi physicians committed in their research. In general, this code aims to create ethical research, to inform participants of the risks, and to also inform them of the possible benefits of the study. The need for stricter standards involving human participants in the United States gave rise to the National Research Act which, ultimately, created IRBs. McGee argues that time has passed, the requirements of the IRBs have become overcomplicated and cumbersome. She continues to show how these have become not only logistical problems, but epistemological problems in current socially progressive research that put academic freedom at risk. To counter this issue, McGee puts forth several ways to move towards a freer approach for the research future in academia through: the collaboration between researchers and IRBs, the rethinking of IRBs as co-participants rather than adversarial bodies, the reflection of researchers on assumptions made about their audience, and the collaboration of researchers with one another.
Steinberg, G. “Literature and Influence: A New Model for Introductory Literature
Courses.” Pedagogy Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature Language Composition and Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, 2013, pp. 469–486., doi:10.1215/15314200-2266423.
Steinberg details her reimagination of her introductory literature course around a central text. She calls this reimagined literature course an “Influences” course, and it is comprised of four fundamental components: literary or other works that contributed in various ways to the central text, critical writing that responds to the text, literature or other art that grows out of the central text, and active inclusion of students’ contributions of the course texts. Steinberg talks about the required literature courses for students, and she works to design a course that does not just seem like a hoop to jump through for those who will not end up being English majors. She claims that, “by beginning with a single, central work and moving backward, forward, and outward from there, the Influences class introduces students to the field not by exposing them to a broad historical swath but by encouraging them to find connections among literary works and with texts that are already meaningful to them.” Alongside the central text, she encourages attention to previous scholarly, critical engagement with the text to bolster understanding. As well, she recommends requiring student contributions in the form of parodic writing and engagement with another text that grew out of, or was influenced by, the central text of the course. Finally, she concedes that no single-semester course can accomplish what we want students to know. However, she contends that, “Influences courses also enable students to recognize their own worth in the classroom, not only as consumers of professors’ reading lists but also as collaborators whose choices have academic worth and as teachers with the power to inform and shape their classmates and professors.”
Wells, Kathleen. Narrative Inquiry. Oxford University Press, 2011.