Moral qualities of experiential narratives

Abstract

This study argues for the need to collect data on the interaction of imaginative processes and moral and ethical qualities of narrative. It locates the curricular context of experiential narratives and provides a narrative illustration of key terms from a moral theory. It reports on research in which experiential narratives were told to grades 7–10 students and describes student reactions to three speakers’ narrative accounts. For the students the encounter seemed to be an experience in imaginative resourcefulness within moral and ethical territory. Prior experiences were called up and likely modified. The moral impact of the encounter came about through a specific interaction between the narrative world offered by a speaker and the existing imaginative repertoire of a listener.

Keywords:

• action research
• curriculum research
• hermeneutics
• imagination
• narration

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for Michael Englishman’s participation in my project and for his specific approval of quotations used in this paper. He gave permission to use his real name because he is a frequent and well‐known speaker in local schools. I also appreciate the help I received from two assistants at each research site, the teachers involved, and Chao Jia’s help in editing this paper.

Notes

1. There were two groups of students, a grade 7/8 class in a rural area in a Canadian maritime province, and two grade‐10 classes in Southern Ontario, Canada.

2. I am in the process of using Booth’s analyses to describe and appraise the moral qualities of selected speakers’ experiential narratives (Conle and DeBeyer under review).

3. The distinction was first introduced by Habermas in 1988 in his Howison Lecture (Habermas 1992: 7).

4. ‘Moral’ is taken here in a general, everyday sense; Johnson (1993) is not referring to Habermas’s specific term.

5. In a previous paper (Conle 2003), I distinguish between ‘story’, ‘narrative’, and ‘narrating’ or the telling of the story in order to discuss various venues for curricular action. In this paper I do not rigorously maintain this distinction.

6. Elsewhere I discuss how the ethos of such gifts may be appraised (Conle and DeBeyer under review).

7. See Dewey’s (1938) definitions of education.

8. Pseudonyms are used for students throughout the paper.

9. Genette (1980) distinguishes between ‘story’, ‘acts of narrating’, and ‘narrative’ (see Conle 2003, and note 5 above).

10. Tappan and Brown (1991) use the word ‘moral’ in an everyday sense rather than conforming to Habermas’s terminology.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carola Conle

Carola Conle is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, 11th Floor, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6; e‐mail [email protected]. She conducts research through narrative inquiry on the moral qualities of experiential, narrative curricula. She has published in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, European Journal of Teacher Education, Curriculum Inquiry, and other journals.