Telling stories of research

Abstract

Experimental narrative forms of writing research can offer empowering representations for adult education and feminist researchers. This article presents a selection of academic storytelling in the form of scanned transcript poems or ‘Learning stories’, produced through interviews with women who participated in a special access program in rural New South Wales, Australia. I suggest that such forms can allow the ‘voices’ of those researched to express both individual and collective experience in concise and unique ways, cutting across arbitrary divisions between public and private, objective and subjective. The form not only offers wider audiences for academic writing about the education of adults, but is also potentially liberating for those within the academic context who wish to read and produce research in different but representative ways. Finally I discuss some of the controversial questions raised by poetic narratives as academic writing, proposing that their production is a form of analysis, which does not overwhelm the data with the researcher's narrative, and that they are indeed a legitimate form of research that generates knowledge. I propose that the potential applications for such research writing methods are still emerging in adult education and beyond.

Keywords:

• experimental writing
• academic storytelling
• feminism
• voice
• poetic narratives
• research