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The Qualitative Report 2020 Volume 25, Number 11, Article 10, 3962-3975
Methods of a Narrative Inquirist:
Storying the Endured Teacher Identity
Taylor A. Norman
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA
While I was a young English language arts teacher, my teacher identity matured
in a nurturing environment cultivated by my veteran colleagues. Finding that
this is not the common narrative told by beginning teachers (Alsup, 2019, 2006;
Danielewicz, 2001), I wondered what impact sharing the stories of my veteran
colleagues could have on young teachers. The purpose of this paper is to explain
why narrative inquiry fit the parameters of this particular inquiry, what methods
were utilized and how the project was constructed. Like Spector-Mersel (2011),
I intend to describe my use of narrative inquiry to expand its conceptual and
methodological definitions. Keywords: Narrative Inquiry, Teacher Identity,
Qualitative Methodology
“Had you known all of the above, you might have decided not to get on, and
then you would have missed the best 25 years of your life.” —Marylin
1
, ELA
teacher, 25 years’ experience
While I was a young English language arts (ELA) teacher, I was inspired by the veteran
ELA teachers with whom I worked. They were not old and crotchety, as I had heard veteran
teachers sometimes described. Instead, they were creative, communal, and reflective. They
used their experience to inform classroom decisions; they wisely advised new teachers; they
planned courses and advocated for students as a whole group. Also, they were genuinely happy
with their professional identity. This is the environment where my young teacher identity
matured, and their demonstrated creative-communal-reflective teacher stance and positive
well-being became my model. As my teacher identity grew, the influence and support of these
experienced colleagues encouraged me to take on leadership roles in curriculum and student
advocacy. In these roles and surrounded by passionate and positive veteran teachers, I
transitioned from student to teacher with little tension. I would come to find, however, that this
is not the common narrative told by teachers with two years or less experience (Alsup, 2019;
2006; Britzman, 1991; Danielewicz, 2001). Learning that my experience had been different, I
was curious about what possible impact sharing this embodied stance and well-being could
have on young teachers.
When I entered my doctoral studies, I consciously nurtured an inquiry project geared
toward defining and describing the creative-communal-reflective teacher stance and positive
well-being I mimicked as a young teacher. To bring the inquiry to light, I approached five of
my veteran ELA teacher colleagues, all with 15 plus years’ experience, and asked that Marylin,
Elizabeth, Lauren, Marla, and Harry
2
narrate how they created and recreated a teacher identity
informed by an evolving teacher stance and experienced through a positive well-being. I
wondered how their teaching life stories might inform the identity narratives of other young
teachers, who have been known to leave the profession in the first few years teaching because
1
Pseudonyms are used to protect the identity of all participants.
2
Pseudonyms are used to protect the identity of all participants.
Taylor A. Norman 3963
of the tension caused while students transition to teachers (Alsup, 2019, 2006; Britzman, 1991;
Danielewicz, 2001). This paper, though, will not recount the stories of these five veteran
teachers; rather, it will explain why narrative inquiry fit the parameters of my inquiry project,
what methods were used to interpret stories of professional identity, and how the project took
the particular shape it did as I pursued narratives to explain why these five teachers remained
in their classrooms—even after their first border crossing from student to teacher.
Like Spector-Mersel (2011) and McCormack (2004) before me, my intention is to
describe my process and detail my practical applications of narrative inquiry to expand its
conceptual and methodological definitions. Particularly, I share the story of my project for
other inquirists who want to tell the story of an identity embodied in oneself, but inspired by
another’s, or better yet, one’s community. Because Macintyre Latta et al. (2018) suggest
mobilizing narrative inquiry to illustrate “individuality in ways that enrich others and the
community-in-the-making” (p. 9), I constructed an inquiry project that aimed to define an
identity that, I believed, had the potential to enrich the teaching community. An identity that I
came to embody but inherited from the wise advisors of my professional community. Wanting
to mobilize narrative inquiry to uncover this definition, I had to find ways to co-author their
stories; I had to find ways to litter the pages of my inquiry with their voices. I had to find
methods that would speak through their stories, while speaking back at their stories.
To speak through and back at their stories, post-qualitative inquiry recommends that
inquirists make clear “the ways in which knowledge claims are made” through their choices in
methods and methodology (Gerrard, et al., 2017, p. 391). These clarifications speak through
and back at what the inquirist surmises about a participant’s narrative experience; they listen,
live, and report the participant’s experience. To reach this goal, I operated as a third-person
omniscient narrator during the teachers’ stories, and a first-person narrator while telling the
narrative specific to the inquiry. To compose their stories, I used the methods of life story
interviews (Atkinson, 2007; Baddeley & Singer, 2007); reflective writings composed by
myself in the form of a researcher’s journal (Barkhuizen & Hacker, 2009), and by the
participants in the form of a letter to their former teacher selves (Bullock & Ritter, 2011;
Carlsson, 2012); and a narrative written by the participants reflecting on their participation in
the project (Frank, 2010). With the participants directly speaking through the project’s methods
in their reflections and letters, the inquiry spoke back to knowledge claims, that if done any
other way, would have been only my own.
Once compiled, organized, and completed, this inquiry project became a set of love
stories for readers to experience and make sense of in their own teacher lives (Greene, 1994).
Marylin’s quote above is what I learned summed up in less than 30 words. These five veteran
teachers narrated stories of endurance. They endured the evolving of emotional distress and
professional responsibility as students and standards came and went. They endured their
teacher identity even when they felt they could no longer “get on”. Accordingly, the focus of
this paper will be how the endured teacher identity was found, framed, and storied through
narrative inquiry’s lens.
Why Narrative Inquiry?
The stories we tell of our experiences matter (Barone, 2001; Bruner, 1990;
Polkinghorne, 1988). They narrate our identities (McAdams & McLean, 2013; Damasio,
1999). They give our life purpose, intention, and conviction (Frank, 2010). Narrative inquiry’s
methodological purpose is to honor the power of the stories we tell, which offered me and the
participating teachers an intimate, collaborative research methodology invested in human
development and worldly awareness (Caine et al., 2017; Chase, 2018; Clandinin, 2013; Maple
& Edwards, 2009), as well as a relationship that goes beyond the paradigmatic, logic-scientific
3964 The Qualitative Report 2020
epistemologies and into the realms of post-qualitative inquiry (Barone, 2001; Bruner, 1986;
Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Gerrard et al., 2017). Furthermore, narrative inquiry yields a dialogic
space to discuss matters of being human, in that space and at that time (Bakhtin, 1981; Bhabha,
1994). The space that calls our stories masks and asks those stories why they are masks
(Grumet, 1988).
According to Bakhtin (1981), it is the novel, not the Epic, that dialogues openly about
its interpretation, and works to make sense of existence in the post-industrial age. Novels are
localized; they exist in only the story’s space and time; they are influenced by which words
were chosen to represent any notable story, an interpretation that is bound only to the context
in which the words exist. Narrative inquiry, then, can be read like a novel, as it is composed of
relative language and subsequent stories (Rorty, 1979) that are open to and fluid in their
interpretation (Barone, 2001). This fluidity became of utmost importance while constructing
my inquiry project, since I wanted the inquiry to speak for itself while speaking to itself. I
wanted the narrative to discuss matters of being a teacher that mattered to the teaching
community.
Narrative inquiry is a methodology that inquires of a narrative while narrating the
process of its inquiry. This transparency and flexibility furnish inquirists with methods of all
shapes, shades, and sizes. Methodological choices are subjective to the inquirist’s project. This
subjectivity must be shared among inquirists to expand the parameters of future conceptual and
methodological interpretations. After all, shadows cast between dark and light are composed
of the same elements but result in infinite contrast. This is my project’s shade on narrative
inquiry’s subjective spectrum of methods. I share my methodological choices to offer a
possible application of narrative inquiry in order to expand its current applications.
The Shades of Narrative’s Gray
Narrative inquiry is extremely “multi-layered and complex”; it cannot capture facts;
instead, it can articulate the “meaning of experience” (Thomas, 2012, p. 211). Therefore, the
questions a narrative inquirist asks about the inquiry’s purpose are part and parcel to her
choosing narrative inquiry as a methodological direction (Barone, 2007; Chase, 2018;
Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007). If the
study is grounded in narrative inquiry, then these questions, too, choose the qualitative methods
and the analysis procedure by the researcher aligning the methods to her research objective
(Chase, 2018; Tierney, 2002). To represent this analysis, the narrative inquirist must be totally
transparent when reporting the project’s findings (Montero & Washington, 2011). For me, this
transparency opened up a channel of storytelling that wielded no authority in its way of
knowing (Caine et al., 2017). I did not want to own my colleagues’ stories; I did not want to
be the authority of their ways of knowing. Therefore, the nature of narrative inquiry and its
ability to report participant stories and blur the lines of authority fit my needs.
If the narrative inquirist has no truths to report or statistics to call significant, then there
is only the inquirist’s voice and her narration of the work as representation. So, first, it is
important that the narrative inquirist know what inquiry narrative she wishes to explore
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Montero & Washington, 2011). Knowing that I was after the
personal narrative of veteran teachers who had an evolving teacher stance and a positive well-
being, I began seeking out methods that could represent the stories they told about their
embodiment of this identity. Because there is no one way to do any of this, the narrative
inquirist spends time trying on methods and determining what benefits her unique inquiry. This
process has led to different methodological reasons for capturing and narrating human
experiences with narrative inquiry. Generally, inquirists might choose methods that capture
participant stories as they live in relation with them (Boje, 2007); they might choose methods
Taylor A. Norman 3965
that narrate stories told of lived experience (Baddeley & Singer, 2007). Through “interviews,
conversations, autobiographical writings, and so on” (Clandinin, 2007, p. xi), inquirists capture
and narrate the telling or living of human experience, either professionally or personally
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). One such way an inquirist can capture stories telling of the
human experience is through life stories (Atkinson, 2007; Spector-Mersel, 2011; Thomas,
2012).
This need to capture life stories came from narrative researchers, as social scientists,
needing “to explore and develop knowledge about areas of the human realm” that were more
specific to “people’s experienced meanings of their life events and activities” then to the limits
put on social scientists by common positivist frames (Polkinghorne, 2007, p. 484). When
reporting what they learned about the human realm, trustworthiness and transparency gave the
research quality and integrity (Barone, 2007; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Polkinghorne,
2007). This transparency and trustworthiness are pertinent to the composure of a life story, as
it is crucial that the narrative inquirist’s participant(s) trusts her well enough to know that what
will be reported in the life story is what was discussed between inquirist and participant(s).
Narrative inquiry, then, expects that truths will be analyzed based on these agreements, as well
as truths that “search for meanings among a spectrum of possible meanings” (Bruner, 1986, p.
25).
Again, my intentions with this project aligned with the expectations of narrative
inquiry. I planned to report my findings not as finite truth, but as possible meanings within the
infinite range of other possible meanings. To do these meanings any justice, I was responsible
for using methods that restory my participants’ stories in their own terms. I was obligated to
live and relive the events storied in their chapters (Chase, 2005; Frank, 2010; McCormack,
2004; Spector-Mersel, 2011). What I learned adhering to this demand, agreed with Barone’s
(1995) warning. He recognizes through his own use of the methodology that this restorying has
the potential to put both/either the inquirist and/or the participant(s) at risk because of the
vulnerability associated with sharing and reporting life stories. This vulnerability is what sets
narrative inquiry apart, as it is that, “living narrative inquiry is what distinguishes narrative
inquiry most drastically from other modes of qualitative research” (Montero & Washington,
2011, p. 339). Participants and inquirists alike have only their stories to support their
conclusions about the human experience, which is a risky endeavor for both.
As I lived another’s story and the participants relived their own stories, this
vulnerability was a palpable reality. Yet, the trustworthiness and transparency possible within
narrative inquiry furnished safe spaces within our at-risk environment. Moreover, because
narrative inquiry weaves the inquiry’s history throughout the participant(s)’ lived experiences
(Chase, 2018; Clandinin, 2013; Sikes, 1997), we were able to openly dialogue about our own
vulnerability. Marylin relived her granddaughter’s diagnosis and remission of cancer as it
related to her growth as a teacher. Marla told stories of the self-hatred she experienced as she
tried to find a positive work-life balance. I dreamt in their stories and cried while trying to make
meaning out of their vulnerability. Through narrative inquiry, I was capable of reporting this
vulnerability either as a third-person or first-person narrator.
The Shade of my Narrative’s Gray
My purpose in using narrative inquiry stems from my need to tell the story of my inquiry
as well as the stories that resided within it. That is what I had heard Barone (2001) saying. It is
not about making our participants’ stories history; it is about reporting the work as an artifact
of history. It tells the stories within a time and place that will never exist again. It reports the
facts as they lived on that day. I thought, at first, this work would be a comprehensive look at
teachers re-storying their lived experience as teachers, one that would be filled with redemption
3966 The Qualitative Report 2020
sequences involving turning points that led to choices important to their professional journeys
(Frank, 2010; McAdams & Bowman, 2001). Positioning teaching as a life story, I found a
narrative identity not filled with sequences of redemption but sequences of endurance.
Using the methods I describe in detail below, I was able to construct lived narratives
spoken from the participant’s understanding of their pedagogical growth and professional
development while enduring the teacher’s life. Teaching life stories, then, are not just the lived
stories of the experienced tension correlated with the border crossing of the student turned
teacher (Alsup, 2006; Danielewicz, 2001), but the stories that narrate the border crossing of the
teacher turned parent, teacher turned partner, teacher turned coach, teacher turned department
head. The application of life story research to this inquiry project highlighted each participant’s
progression through their teaching life regardless of space and/or time (Berger, 2008;
McAdams & McLean, 2013). By recalling these autobiographical memories, veteran teachers
were able to reflect upon their own recollections to make meaning of their teaching lives
(Damasio, 1999; Atkinson, 2007).
Life story interviews. Interviews are the most common method used to collect
narrative research (Hollingsworth & Dybdahl, 2007; Rogers, 2007). Well-crafted interview
questions have the potential to reveal participant life stories when analyzing and reporting the
inquiry. With this being the case, I began by collecting the participants’ teaching life stories
with a one-time, roughly two-hour life story interview, which was also recorded and
transcribed. Because I was inquiring the veteran teacher’s life story, a narrative that I hoped
would be prone to the positive well-being I observed as a young teacher—a well-being I would
come to understand through Aristotle’s concept of “eudaimonia” (Bauer, et al., 2006) because
it was a well-being that was happy and fulfilled—Atkinson’s (2007) approach to the life story
interview permitted the construction of interview questions that re-storied participants’
memories about their understood well-being and existence. By constructing interview
questions that recall memories about (1) ourselves, (2) others, (3) the world around us, and (4)
spirituality, participants were able to bring forth narratives of awareness, experience, existence,
and reflection regarding how each understood her/his professional well-being. Following
Atkinson’s suggestions, I constructed the following interview questions:
Q1: Ourselves: How did you come to call yourself “teacher” —what types of
events happened to inform this new identity you knew as “teacher?”
Q2: Other: How did the community within the school contribute to you calling
yourself teacher? How did the students contribute to you calling
yourself teacher?
Q3: The World Around Us: What happened to you outside of the classroom that
made you see yourself as a teacher? What happened out there, in the
world, that allowed you to think, “I chose the right profession?”
Q4: The World Around Us/Spirituality: What happened in your life as a teacher
that affected your personal life?
Q5: Spirituality: What experiences have you had in the school or your classroom
that contribute to your belief that you were always supposed to be a
teacher?
I used the transcripts of these five-question interviews to re-story the participants’
teaching life stories (McCormack, 2004), and organized their stories as love stories to translate
their histories in a relatable way (Caine et al., 2017; Hardwick, 2011). What I provide below is
how I came to do this. Example 1 is the beginning of one of the participant’s, Harry’s, answers
to the interview, and Example 2 is how I storied the story within the inquiry.
Taylor A. Norman 3967
Example 1:
Author: When you were younger, do you have a first memory that describes
how you might have seen yourself as teacher?
Harry: (He stops to consider the question)—I can remember one of the things
that happened to me, as a child, that started to make me think of myself
as a teacher—first one occurred about, I’m going to say 4
th
, 5
th
,or 6
th
grade, I grew up in Middletown, when I went to elementary school, 4
th
,
5
th
, or 6
th
grade we had a student in our class, who was two years older
than the rest of us, he had held back or failed twice, or whatever it was
called in those days, I remember his name, and in those days there was
sort of a stigma, being held back like that, probably would be true today,
except nobody’s ever held—but, you know, we made fun of him for
being stupid, he was our friend, but we knew he was different, we knew
he belonged a year or two ahead of us, and I just remember once, I and
a couple of other kids in class, you know, we were all talking about how
unintelligent this one guy was, we said, “Let’s make a test for him,” so
we started to make this multi-page test for him, covering all the different
things we were learning in school, there was a math section, it was like
we were doing a standardized test, well the teacher got wind of what we
were doing and cut it off just like that, for obvious reasons, and I
remember thinking “I was having a lot of fun doing that,” trying to make
it a good test, and be fair, I just didn’t see what the commotion was, so
that’s when I was maybe 11 years old, maybe 10, maybe 12.
Example 2:
Regardless of Harry’s avoidance, teaching always fascinated him. He found the
work captivating, the ability to affect change intoxicating. In an early grade, 4
th
,
5
th
, or 6
th
he says, one of his classmates was an older boy. This boy was older
because he had been held back twice. Having repeated the grade two times,
Harry and his friends decided to assess his knowledge, “so we started to make
this multi-page test for him, covering all the different things we were learning
in school, there were multiple sections, it was like we were doing a standardized
test.” In those days, being held back was a sort of social stigma, it suggested
something about both work ethic and intelligence. Playing into what society had
taught them, Harry and his friends embarked on an expedition to prove social
thought true. Before they had time to assess this boy, though, their teacher “got
wind of what we were doing and cut it off, just like that, for obvious reasons.”
Yet, he remembers that experience not because he feels remorse for making fun
of the held back kid (which, of course, he does), but that he remembers actually
enjoying the test-making process. Searching through materials and deciding
what content to select for a good and fair assessment was just plain exciting.
Through this method of re-storying and organizing participant interviews, generally, I added
between 3000 and 4000 words to each participant’s interview in the forms of connective
words/phrases and introductory words/phrases. These added words and phrases shaped a more
coherent and intelligible story. I did this to challenge my authority as the researcher. By using
their words to narrate the majority of their stories, I was able to share the representation of each
3968 The Qualitative Report 2020
participant with each participant (Gerrard et al., 2017; St. Pierre, 2013).
To do this storying, I took stories out of their interviews like puzzle pieces and
thematically placed them where they made the picture of their teaching life stories feel most
complete based on the stories they chose to share and our intimate relationship as colleagues.
To “deepen the awareness” of these teaching life stories (Caine et al., 2017, p. 218), I then
organized the pieces detailed by the participants as a love story (Chapman, 1995; Gee, 2005;
Hardwick, 2011). After reliving Marylin’s statement above, I came to see the image of the
endured teacher identity piece by piece. A 25
th
anniversary party. Low lights. A microphone.
An aged hand. Frail lips. A set of eyes that fall on a partner, happy they’d “stuck it out.”
This image became clearer after I reviewed how a novelist plots a love affair (Hardwick,
2011). Hardwick (2011) plots love in five stages: infatuation, flirtation, friendship,
commitment, and love. These five stages arranged spaces to organize all five participants’
identity narratives in a translatable way (Caine et al., 2017). What I provide in the example of
Harry’s re-storying is organized in the infatuation stage, because his disinterest turns to interest
when he unintentionally performs the actions of a teacher as a young boy. I found these certain
puzzle pieces by listening actively to their descriptions of their lived stories as teachers,
recognizing moments that seemed similar across stories, and living the narratives being spoken
(McCormack, 2004).
Through this process of listening and living, I storied all of the teachers’ chapters story
by story until it assembled as a love story that exposed the image I had recognized as the
endured teacher identity. I used the interview to construct the first four stages, and supplied, in
full, participant-written letters to their former teacher selves and reflections about their
participation in the inquiry to close the fifth and final stage. Therefore, to complete each
participant’s story, I went directly to the source, and asked each participant to write two
reflections about their understood teacher selves. I did this because I wanted the reader to hear
from the participant directly, so to be transparent. By reading their reflections, readers are able
to hear from all parties involved in the construction of the inquiry. This resulted in a co-
authored narrative between researcher and participant.
Reflective letters to their former teacher selves. I asked participants to write letters
to their former teacher selves to make visible the negotiations and re-negotiations narrative
identities process (McAdams, 1993; Sarbin, 2001). Negotiations and re-negotiations that
Bullock and Ritter (2011) assert are elements of self-study, a non-biased, non-prescriptive
method that aids in the description, interpretation, and analysis of pedagogical development (or
impediment) while constructing one’s narrative identity (Singer, 2004). These letters were
presented in full to represent the love they had for their inherited teacher identity. In this letter,
teachers were prompted to tell a story or set of stories they would have liked to have known
during their first few years as a teacher. This letter uncovered conversations of turning points
and transitions without specifically asking for them, something Carlsson (2012) advocates for
when in search of authentic moments of self-innovation or transformation. Additionally, I did
this to display something from each participant that they storied (Bakhtin, 1981; Barone, 1995;
2001). Because we use language, written or spoken, to build and rebuild the worlds around us,
I wanted to add, directly, the language written by each participant about his/her teacher identity
(Bakhtin, 1981; Gee, 2005).
Although “love” was only used as a verb to identify what they liked about their job in
retrospect, they never stated directly that they loved their professional identity. I performed a
discourse analysis to explain how I qualified their letters as love notes to their teacher identity.
I concluded their stories with this discourse analysis. Gee’s discourse analysis situates meaning
in the language used regarding “things that exist in the mind and in the world” (p. 68). This is
the truest and the easiest way “to grasp what [participants] mean” in their own language; as
Taylor A. Norman 3969
well as offer some suggestion for “how and why they are significant” in the researcher’s voice
(p. 69). Because I claim it to be a close, intimate relationship—the endured teacher identity—
I used Chapman’s (1995) languages of love as the tools for my discourse analysis (Gee, 2005).
Chapman, a trained therapist, found five languages most commonly spoken by his clients when
speaking about their love affairs. There were lonely wives who wanted quality time away from
the television with their partners, there were husbands who completed all of the household
chores without any gratification or thanks, there were couples who never had a kind word to
share with one another.
These languages helped me analyze the particular language used in the teachers’ letters
about their love and affection toward their teacher identity. Chapman’s (1995) languages are
as follows:
Words of affirmation: Words of kindness used to encourage or compliment
one’s partner.
Quality time: Time spent together that inspires a kind of togetherness that shares
an intimate dialogue.
Receiving or Giving of Gifts: Tokens of affection and/or visual symbols of love;
gifts are given to show one partner present to the other.
Acts of Service: Any service provided to help with necessary tasks for which
both partners are responsible.
Physical touch: Any sort of physical touch, from hand holding to intercourse.
(p. 15)
While analyzing the discourse used in the letter, I found a maintained, open line of
communication within themselves that spoke directly to their teacher selves in languages
similar to Chapman’s love languages. The endured teacher identity, though, only spoke in a
few of Chapman’s (1995) love languages. “Physical touch” had no real presence in the
language the five teachers shared about their former professional selves. Furthermore, they did
not make much mention of “giving and receiving gifts” regarding their embodiment of the
endured teacher identity. What was found was a saturation of “quality time” when speaking of
this identity.
For example, all five veteran teachers shared an intimate dialogue between themselves
and their former professional selves in their letters. This dialogue was inspired by a shared
togetherness, an if-I-had-known-then-what-I-know-now kind of dialogue. One teacher in
particular, Elizabeth, spoke of keeping teaching journals while a young teacher. In order to
construct her letter, she used feelings found in those journals to explain how quality time spent
between her and her teacher self had been most beneficial to the teacher she is today, as she
writes in her letter to her former teacher self:
Rummaging through a box of old journals, I found the one you kept in the spring
of 1968, your second full year of teaching 7
th
and 8
th
grade English in
Wisconsin. On the first read, I squirmed—so many rookie mistakes and such
profound naïveté. No wonder the two years before this had been so rough.
Between the lines, I could read your angst and sensed the strain. You recorded
your gripes and a whole slug of criticisms, but mainly what you said was this:
“School is so hard—it demands so much.” … By the third read, I was past the
embarrassment over my own clumsiness. I could see myself in your narrative.
Teaching style, values, impulses as an educator—the seeds of what you (I)
became are all there.
3970 The Qualitative Report 2020
Analyzing her discourse for language of her teacher identity spoken in one of Chapman’s love
languages, I interpret:
Elizabeth seems to utter language to her former teacher self in words of quality
time, time spent between Elizabeth and her teacher self reflexively asking
questions of personal reflections occurred over her many years as a teacher. By
reviewing her past teacher journals, she ultimately finds humor in her naiveté,
and reminds her earlier self that this naiveté, no matter how embarrassing, will
be a big part of her coming to find a sense of self in her classroom, a sense of
self she truly loves.
Finding language in her letter that suggested it was this reflective dialogue that she
established through these early activities of writing about her classroom, I was able to see this
reflection as quality time spent thinking about her teacher identity. Elizabeth’s reflective
thinking, she reports, is what solidified her teacher identity.
Reflective narratives regarding their participation in the inquiry. The participants’
discourse was further analyzed based on reflective narratives the participants wrote based on
their experiences with the inquiry. To bring this to life, I posted the participant’s letters to their
former teacher selves to a blog. Each letter was posted by me and was presented to the group
under each teacher’s pseudonym. The teachers were asked to read the letters on the blog. They
were then asked to compose a final reflective narrative based on their experiences participating
in the study. Because participant reflections have the ability to restory how participants might
understand the narratives they presented while participating in the study, narrative inquiry finds
a dialogic voice that emphasizes growth and development through participant reflections
(Frank, 2010). The reflective narrative inquired of this dialogic self-awareness—wondering
what the participants became aware of while composing and reading other relational narratives
of professional identity (Clandinin, 2013). This dialogical self-awareness is revealed in the
following statements made by the teachers:
Harry: The gist of another comment also resonated with me: “Don’t spend too
much time comparing yourself to other teachers. Everyone is different,
and kids need variety. They will run into many different kinds of bosses
and fellow employees that they will need to get along with.” Yes! I
believe deeply that our work—or perhaps our actual impact—as
teachers is just as much to model proper adult behavior and relationships
with others than to get kids to master particular areas of knowledge and
skills.
Lauren: When I have days that are not great, when I have days where I just want
to throw the towel in, when I have days where I think, “Why am I here?
What am I doing?”—I will look back at this experience, I will read my
reflections and the other things I have written, and I will know and
remember and enjoy this wonderful ride that is being an English teacher.
Marla: I feel as though I could place an identity on each letter. The teacher who
is informed by social changes in her youth continued to experiment
throughout her career and work to expand the world of her students. The
teacher who discussed teaching as a community-building endeavor has
long roots in our community with family and employment. His family
Taylor A. Norman 3971
is at the foundation of our town. The roller-coaster rider is the poet and
artist. She is a student favorite for her understanding and smooth cool
interactions with the teens. Now I realize that you meant how do we
identify with these teachers. I wish that I was as introspective as they
are. I wish that I was more about the big picture. I am caught up in
survival and low on Maslow’s hierarchy. They are much closer to self-
actualizing themselves as teachers.
All reflective narratives were also supplied in full and organized in the love stage. I
used the language used in the narratives to subsequently analyze their love for their teacher
identity, as was done with the letters. These narratives spoke in “acts of service” and “words
of affirmation” mostly.
Role of the inquirist. Because these stories are collaborative, because their stories are
narrations made by me drawing “semantic conclusions about the self from the episodic
information that the stories convey” (McAdams & McLean, 2013, p. 235), my role as the
inquirist was to convey the story and its worth to teacher identity research. Through this
conveying, interpretations can be made across episodes, and these interpretations could offer
teachers’ semantic conclusions. To support my claims of interpretation and limit the risk of
mistelling their stories, I included ample amounts of original text, such as that of the letters and
reflective narratives written by the participants (McCormack, 2004; Thomas, 2012). I did this
hoping to stimulate reflection and discussion within the reader about these teaching life stories
(Barone, 2001).
In studies methodologically driven by narrative inquiry, the role of the inquirist is to be
reflexive, reflective, and aware of the participants’ stories and the inquirist’s analysis of these
stories (Chase, 2018; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Polkinghorne, 1988; Riessman, 1990). As
the inquirist, I storied each teacher’s identity as a third-person omniscient narrator to stay
reflexive, reflective, and aware while constructing their identity narratives, and a first-person
narrator when telling the narrative specific to the inquiry. To aid this analysis, I kept a
researcher’s journal. In order to apply and know the narrative spoken by each participant,
reflexively and rigorously, I kept a reflective journal that questioned what I thought the work
was going to be, how it was going to be that way, and important reflections of what was
happening, intra-personally, while I wrote the entire study.
Other than my own personal reflections on the work, I kept any continued
communication with the participants in this journal. If there was a need to re-interview a
participant or there were any emails shared between the two of us that found purpose in a
participant’s narrative, I added them to my researcher’s journal. For example, when Marylin
decided to retire mid-year, we scheduled a new meeting focused on her decisions and its
connection to her professional life story. This second interview was then transcribed in my
journal.
The teaching life stories were then constructed by the life story interviews, participant-
written reflections, and any subsequent communication we had during the creation of their
stories. This method of writing their stories allowed me to tell their story as their storyteller; it
allowed me to story their stories in their terms (McCormack, 2004). Upon their completion,
participants were emailed their stories before my doctoral defense. It was encouraging to
receive “words of affirmation” from them. In their own terms, Elizabeth, Harry, Marylin,
Lauren, and Marla explained that their stories made them proud of the teachers they had
become.
3972 The Qualitative Report 2020
Conclusion
By way of narrative inquiry, these veteran teachers taught me that a sustained teacher
identity must be one that endures. This endurance evolves into a practice informed by a
creative-communal-reflective teacher stance and experienced through a positive well-being. It
hurts. It celebrates. It listens. It advocates. It empathizes. It disciplines. Yet, ultimately, it loves.
That is why this project was pieced together as a love story. Similar to a love story, this identity
evolves and revolves as it endures the conditions of sharing space in another’s life. I collected
these stories so that young teachers could have a collection of stories to support them through
their first tense border crossing from student to teacher, in order to cross the next border, then
the next, and the next, until their teaching identity gives their lives purpose. Until their teacher
identity is inseparable from who they are. If this purpose is not found, then, I fear, young
teachers will continue to prematurely resign from their classrooms because of their inability to
cross the student-teacher border.
When I first stepped into my classroom, I crossed the threshold between student and
teacher as most young teachers do; I entered into a career about which I knew nothing. I chose
a career based on a profession I had imagined. I had no idea what would be expected. I had no
idea I was going to have to teach through students dying, through students dropping-out,
through students being searched for oxycontin only to find out it was aspirin, through students
losing all of their possessions in a fire, through students calling me stupid, through students
telling me I failed them. I had no idea. But the veteran teachers with whom I worked did, and
that is the life-blood of this entire project. Their stance and well-being informed my vulnerable
and frightening first few years. My inquiry project’s goal was to find a way to share their
teaching life stories, so that young teachers could have the tools I had as a young teacher. Once
narrative inquiry revealed itself as a method that embodied experience through stories, I found
a way to tell the story of the endured teacher identity, an identity inspired by my colleagues
and defined to enrich the teaching community as well as its community-in-the-making.
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Author Note
After a four-year career as a rural high school English teacher, Dr. Taylor Norman
attended Purdue University for her graduate degrees in English Education. With a background
in English language arts pedagogy, Dr. Norman's research stories the identities and practices
of inservice English language arts teachers. By using narratives of experiences from the
classroom, either about teacher identity or pedagogical practice, Dr. Norman's research builds
bridges by highlighting stories of theory and practice. Dr. Norman has presented her research
on English teacher identities and pedagogical practices at national conferences such as the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and American Educational Research
Association (AERA). Currently, Dr. Norman is an Assistant Professor of English language arts
education at Georgia Southern University. Please direct correspondence to
Acknowledgements: Thank you to my dissertation committee--Drs. Janet Alsup,
Joann Phillion, Judy Lysaker, and Jake Burdick. The story of this research began with all your
wise advice.
Copyright 2020: Taylor A. Norman and Nova Southeastern University.
Article Citation
Taylor, N. A. (2020). Methods of a narrative inquirist: Storying the endured teacher identity.
The Qualitative Report, 25(11), 3962-3975.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol25/iss11/10
