Teachers Responding to Narrative Inquiry: An Approach to Narrative Inquiry Criticism

ABSTRACT

Using a reader-response approach, the author examines practitioners’ interpretations of three narrative inquiry texts to highlight how their responses suggest ways to enhance and more particularly nuance narrative inquiry representations of teaching practice. She asserts that the transactive character of the reader-response relationship across texts and readers makes it possible to examine the contextual and discursive influences shaping both the production of narrative inquiry texts and the readers’ responses to them. Findings suggest that practitioners do not always receive and interpret narrative texts as they are intended, and that those divergent interpretations offer ways to further develop the field of narrative inquiry scholarship.

Keywords:

• teacher knowledge research
• reader response theory
• reflexivity