Using Narrative Methodology

The Share project ran from 2008-2012 and aimed to gain insight into how educators in Higher Education share teaching practice; how they represent it; how they use representations in turn, and how, when and with what evidence they change their teaching practice. The project comprised several separate, although inter-related, investigations and used narrative both as a medium with regard to representing practice and as a methodology in research studies. As Olson observes:

… narratives are key components in the authentic study of teaching, for until we understand the context and appreciate the perspectives of those involved, any understanding of what it means to teach and learn will remain fragmented and disconnected from the real world of teaching (Olson, 1997)

In investigating teachers’ practice, we undertook four narrative enquiries. In the body of this handbook we consider each, in both theoretical and pragmatic reflection, in the hope that it may be of use to other researchers embarking on this sort of enquiry. We preface this with a short examination of the use of narrative as a medium and follow with the presentation of an analytic framework that emerged from the combination of narrative methodologies we employed.