On 27 Oct 2009, at 13:07, BRENDAN CRONIN wrote:
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Dear All,
I have just read Andrew's 'Creativity Works' and enjoyed it greatly. I came across the phrase "Life's narrative wreckage' and wondered if anyone would mind explaining it to me. Thanks Jack for replying to my question about educational values. I will respond soon to what you said. Thanks for spending the time on it.
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Dear Brendan and all, I use the idea of 'life's narrative wreckage' to emphasise the importance of resisting telling a 'smooth story of self' which omits some of the difficulties encountered by practitioner-researchers in improving their practice and gaining academic legitimacy for their knowledge. It emerged from reading Maggie MacLure's 1996 article with the extract below:
Telling Transitions: Boundary Work in Narratives of Becoming an Action Researcher Author(s): Maggie MacLure Source: British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3, Post-Modernism and Post- Structuralism in Educational Research, (Jun., 1996), pp. 273-286
"Lather (1994) has noted that the narratives of educational research (and not just action research) are usually victory narratives. She wonders what it might mean to rethink research as a 'ruin', in which risk and uncertainty are the price to be paid for the possibility of breaking out of the cycle of certainty that never seems to deliver the hoped-for happy ending. Are the transition stories discussed above victory narratives? If so, they are not vainglorious ones. But I wonder whether it is worth considering other ways that interviewees and interviewers might collaborate in the telling of life stories. The aim would not be to try to get more coherent and 'disinterested' narratives, as Woods (1985) or Butt et al. (1992) want to do. The point might be to resist resolution, to live 'at the hyphen' as Fine
(1994) puts it, between those boundaries that are inevitably implicated in narratives of becoming an action researcher. Might we be cyborgs, hybrids or tricksters, whose business is to prevent solutions to the problem of getting safely across the boundaries of teacher/ academic, personal/professional, being/becoming?I f we tell our lives, and expect to hear them told by others, in ways which constantly try to overcome 'alterity'-that incalcu-lable Otherness that deconstructionists argue is the forgotten 'origin' of the core self-can we be sure that we are not acting on behalf of those institutions whose business is the 'colonisation of the Other' (Spivak, 1988)? Couture (1994) suggests, playfully but nonetheless seriously, that action research within the academy might be just such an enterprise. He imagines the university as Dracula, feeding off the virgin souls (selves) of teachers who offer themselves up in the name of reflective practice. Couture
fears that action research works by consuming the ungovernable alterity of the 'client', producing a state of amnesia, and leaving in its place 'this dead, smelly thing called teacher identity' (p. 130)-a simulacrum that silences resistance and erases the memory of other, fractured and conflicting possibilities of identity. If he is right, what must we have forgotten in order to tell these smooth stories of the self? For instance, about the impossibility and the necessity of leaving the 'island', or the Garden, of teaching, and the discomforts of being 'haunted' thereafter by the spectre of practice; about the way in which the poles of the 'inside'-'outside' dualism reverse themselves, valorising first one term, then the other, in a movement which is never fully or finally arrested." (MacLure, p. 283)
