Critiquing narrative inquiry’s epistemological pillars within a large-scale study into the teaching of phonics

ABSTRACT

Narrative inquiry has long been respected as a qualitative approach to researching the lived experiences of participants. Used widely in educational research the approach enables insights into the practices, perspectives and preferences of teachers, most often considering a small number of participants within a close circle of influence. In response to the challenge of evaluating a sector wide literacy reform initiative we were interested to ascertain if narrative inquiry might be used to explore a large sample size, over broad geographical spaces at different points in time as teachers worked collaboratively to explore the teaching of Phonics in Context. We collected teachers’ stories via digital platforms and keeping true to the principles of narrative inquiry, deliberately addressed its key epistemological components, namely, relationality, temporality, landscapes and competing stories through the data analysis process. The findings from the study indicate that narrative inquiry at scale can be a cost-effective way to collect, analyse and report on the experiences of teachers while adding a critical lens to policy and or pedagogical implementation and evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative inquiry
• qualitative research at scale
• teaching phonics

Narrative inquiry as a methodology is an effective way to glean insight into the lived experiences of being a teacher. Often, narrative methodologies are employed within small-scale research involving small sample sizes (Polkinghorne 1988, Webster and Mertova 2007, Caine et al. 2013). This paper reports a study that embraced epistemological principles of narrative inquiry; specifically, relationality, temporality, landscapes and competing stories (Clandinin and Connelly 2000), to examine professional learning and approaches to teaching with a large sample size, over broad geographical spaces at different points in time. The aim of this paper is to explore the affordances and limitations of narrative inquiry ‘at scale’ through reflection and critique on a narrative inquiry method employed against epistemological pillars of narrative inquiry. To do this, the method employed within this study will be described, followed by a critique of the method against narrative inquiry epistemological pillars, and finally a critical discussion about the affordances and limitations narrative inquiry research at scale can make to educational research landscapes.

Introducing the narrative inquiry – Phonics in context

The narrative inquiry described in this paper focuses on a professional learning programme, Phonics in Context, that supports teachers to integrate the teaching of phonics within meaningful contexts for literacy learning. There is continued and intense public interest in questions surrounding how children develop early literacy skills and how they can best be taught, with this the focus of Australian and international reviews and reports on the teaching of literacy and more specifically the teaching of reading (National Reading Panel 2000, DEST 2005) Often conceptualized as a binary between ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ approaches to teaching reading, the teaching of phonics is central to this discussion (Wyse and Bradbury 2022). While the importance of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and phonics as key aspects of comprehensive early literacy programmes are well recognized, debate continues about the manner in which these skills are taught (Castles et al. 2018). The professional learning programme that is the subject of this paper sought to assist teachers to broaden their conceptualizations of early literacy beyond a staged, sequenced process of decoding or encoding followed by comprehension, and to consider more complex, contemporaneous approaches of teaching, where phonics teaching is integrated within a range of meaning extraction and construction processes (Scull 2010).

The Phonics in Context program involved teachers in a range of offsite and onsite activities. The teachers attended three days of phonics focussed facilitated professional learning, designed to build teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of the teaching of phonics. Teachers were encouraged to consider both reading and writing as contexts for learning about phonics and to ensure ‘students learn how to attend to all the sound units of our language (words, syllables, rhymes and phonemes) and to visually recognize letters and letter patterns used to represent those sounds’ (Catholic Education Melbourne 2017). School based Professional Learning Teams continued this work in situ, with teaching teams collaborating to develop teaching plans and to assess the impact of their teaching on students’ learning. Schools were then able to nominate to participate in a further structured learning programme to support the development of organizational routines and professional collaboration or design their own structures and processes for continual professional improvement. The aim of both pathways was to support the implementation of the phonics teaching and to advance students’ literacy learning outcomes. The programme was a system-wide initiative, within one Catholic diocese, and ran for a period of 12 months over the course of a school year.

Research aims and methods

As the aim of the Phonics in Context programme was to build teacher capacity to teach phonics, the participating teachers’ experiences were central to evaluating its effectiveness. The research project’s aim was to uncover the teachers’ experiences as they translated the professional learning into their classroom practice. In addition, the focus was to test narrative inquiry ‘at scale’ in this context.

In total, 45 teachers and 193 students (matched data sets) from 20 schools engaged in the programme agreed to participate in this study. A range of data collection tools were used to map teachers’ and students’ progress throughout the reform process. These included teacher pre and post survey responses and students’ pre and post reading and writing work samples (Kervin et al. 2016). The survey data showed an increased efficacy in teaching phonics. The analysis of students’ reading and writing data provided clear evidence of the impact of Phonics in Context teaching, with a positive overall effect on students’ learning from times 1 to time 2, with effect sizes approximately at or above .4 on all measures (Scull et al. 2019)

These data sets were complementary to the teacher stories that comprised our narrative inquiry, at size and scale. Although the initial contact was either face-to-face or by telephone, given the number of teachers involved and their various locations across the greater metropolitan region of a large capital city, email was used as the means to communicate the prompts and engage with the teachers. A series of three prompts sent to teachers over the course of the school year (Jiménez and Orozco 2021). It was these prompts (which required teachers to share their stories of change and practice and to share the context in which they were experiencing this aspect of their work) that formed the dataset that was aligned with the principles of narrative inquiry Prompt 1, emailed to teachers at the beginning of the project focused on prior knowledge, context and practice with teachers asked to note factors that had influenced their teaching. Prompt 2 sent at the mid-point of the school year focused on their experience of professional learning. Teachers were asked report a recent lesson, noting the lesson focus, teaching tasks and students’ learning. They were also asked to describe how the Phonic in Context professional learning had influenced this lesson and to detail plans in regard to future teaching. Prompt 3, sent in the final term of the school year focused on their current practice, informed by professional learning. Teachers were asked to comment on two or three things they had done differently as a consequence of their professional learning and the impact of these changes had on your students’ learning. They were also asked supply annotated planning documents, which demonstrates the teaching of phonics in context. The teachers’ narratives were analysed to produce thematic findings into how the Phonics in Context programme was being implemented within the focus schools, and some of the key factors, including structures, practices and attitudes, that influenced teaching (Clarke et al. 2015).

The study was performed with approval from the university’s Human Research Ethics Committee as well as permission from the host educational system and schools. Individual participant consent was also obtained prior to the commencement of the study.

Methodological explorations

A narrative inquiry approach allowed the experiences of teachers to be shared around how they were experiencing professional learning of the Phonics in Context programme, and how they are using this professional learning to enact classroom practice. As a qualitative research approach, narrative inquiry seeks to interpret and understand the lived experiences of humans. Webster and Mertova (2007) define narrative inquiry as capturing ‘human stories of experiences … [that] provide researchers with a rich framework through which they can investigate the ways humans experience the world depicted through their stories’ (p. 23). Marvasti adds that ‘Narrative Inquiry aims to fully understand how various experiences relate to one another under the demands of the setting in which they are articulated’ (Marvasti 2004 p. 101). Schultz and Ravitch (2012) suggest that narratives illuminate the particular experiences of individuals and groups that can offer context to the grand narrative. ‘Small stories’, they suggest, ‘often live in the shadow of the grand narrative’ (p. 3). Yet it is the ‘small stories’ that often illuminate the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of particular phenomenon. At the core of this research project was our desire for research participants to be able to share their experiences of the Phonics in Context programme, considering how interrelated factors influence both their professional learning and their professional enactment of that learning. Narrative inquiry offered us the methodological opportunity to consider not only the stories teachers shared, but also the contexts in which various stories were being told, and factors influencing both the contexts and the participants themselves (Cresswell 2013).

Narrative inquiry allows for the exploration and consideration of the social context in which the story is being told; the choices research participants make about the identity they are wishing to portray within their context; and the complexity and interconnectedness of the decisions they make as a result (Atkinson 2007). To understand the impact of a professional learning programme and a system-wide policy decision on teachers, we needed to understand the stories of experience behind how the professional learning was being understood and enacted within the context of school cultures. In the context of this research project, we believed that narrative inquiry would afford a richness and depth, by considering not only what the participants do as part of their work, but the social discourse of which they are a part.

Beginning with the individual story allows what Schultz and Ravitch (2012) call the grand narrative to be challenged. Often the grand narrative is constructed by a social discourse that is disconnected from the people it influences most. Schultz and Ravitch (2012) suggest that narratives illuminate the particular experiences of individuals and that using small stories to counter the grand narrative allows an intimate insight into the phenomena being considered: ‘Small stories’, they suggest, ‘often live in the shadow of the grand narrative’ (p. 3). This research project explored the lived experiences of teachers as they navigated the path between ‘received knowledge’ and ‘narratives of accountability’, and their own beliefs and experiences of what constitutes effective teaching and learning of phonics in context. It gathered the insider’s view of the work of teachers as they navigated in and around the ‘grand narratives’ of phonics teaching and learning. Narrative inquiry allows the ‘hidden’ stories to emerge, and from those hidden or small stories offers a contribution to the theoretical literature and education discourse (including policy decisions) of phonics teaching and learning. Through the process of this study, we gathered the small stories from the 45 participants at different points in time. We carefully read the stories for experience, and the context around the experience. This informed our thematical analysis, which focused on individual participant stories over time and across a range of varied locations and thus represented the vertical and horizontal analysis of our data.

An epistemological critique of the method

Keeping true to the principles of narrative inquiry, we deliberately addressed its key epistemological components, namely, relationality, temporality, landscapes and competing stories (Clandinin and Connelly 2000, Connelly and Clandinin 2006, Webster and Mertova 2007). We thought about the epistemological pillars of narrative inquiry as complex ‘ways of knowing’, particularly when the pillars suggested above are synthesized and woven to produce complex narrative insights. We offer snapshots of stories from the data, along with analysis of how we thought about and attempted to innovatively uphold the epistemological foundations of narrative inquiry into novel research contexts to produce ways of knowing across size and scale.

Relationality

A narrative inquirer attempts to create a research space where research participants feel safe and comfortable to tell their version of a story. A narrative inquirer needs to be as interested in how the research participant arrived at a particular event, as the event itself. The richness of narrative inquiry data lies in the multidimensional directions of the inquiry (Lindsay 2006). As narrative inquirers, we came to the inquiry with our own lived experiences. We shared parts of our professional and personal identities with participants as a way of building trust and mutual understanding. It was our hope that by positioning ourselves as both practitioner and researcher, we would be able to build trust and openness in order to capture and respectfully interpret the research participants’ stories.

Dahlberg (1995) captures this idea when she suggests that whenever an inquiry begins, both researcher and research participant are already living their respective narratives, be it the narrative of a classroom teacher or that of a researcher. Consequently, one of the most important tasks for any narrative inquirer to tackle is how to negotiate relationships in order to capture the rich narrative data. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) suggest, ‘throughout an inquiry, in our experience of being in the field, the researcher-participant relationship is a tenuous one, always in the midst of being negotiated’ (p. 72). Quite often, this relationship is tenuous because the different parties are building different narratives, rather than a shared narrative. In other words, the researcher and the participant in the research often do not pay enough attention to what each other needs, and the relationship fails. Clandinin and Connelly put it this way: ‘in today’s popular language, relationships need to be worked at’ (p. 73).

As researchers we were particularly interested in the relationality of the inquiry. We wanted to hear ‘real’ stories, of ‘real’ experiences of teaching phonics in context. We needed research participants – teachers – to feel they could talk to us safety and vulnerably, knowing that we were invested in ‘understanding’ and ‘empathizing’ with their lived experiences. We did not want to hear rehearsed school lines or department lines, where teachers recounted what they thought we wanted to hear, or what they thought was expected of them by their employer. Therefore, the relationality focus in this inquiry, as with so many other good narrative inquiries, was about building trust so that the story was safe to tell. We did this in a number of ways.

First, we attended the professional development days with the participants, not as facilitators, or researchers; we were participants interested in the professional learning. We sat at different tables, worked with different teachers, shared our own stories of pedagogical vulnerability. We ‘walked with’ participants in this phase of the project.

Second, our research assistant, who interfaced with the research participants was a practicing teacher. We encouraged the research assistant to interact with the research participants from a dual identity perspective, as research assistant and as classroom teacher. The research assistant was able to empathize with research participants during periods of high workload, such as report writing time. She was able to talk with research participants using a shared vocabulary. An example of this was when a data prompt was due during report writing time. The research assistant was able to write emails along the lines of:

I understand how busy this time is. I am struggling with writing reports and managing this project too. But I’m just wondering if you could get the prompt to me by … (Research Assistant)

What seems like an unremarkable email from the research assistant actually had a remarkable impact. The research assistant, through her conversations and sharing of her own lived experience, built a level of trust with research participants. The impact was that not only did we get the data required, but we received considered data – a thoughtful reflective story of practice.

Third, as a research team we engaged with a stakeholder group throughout the research process. The stakeholder group included senior administrators and project staff tasked with overseeing the implementation of the project. While this group were not research participants, they were decision makers with the capacity to exert influence over the research participants. Throughout the project we continually highlighted to the stakeholder group the vulnerability we were asking from research participants. Empathetic to this, the stakeholder group reinforced to participants their desire to ‘really hear’ the stories of experience. Again, this seems unremarkable, but in a culture of accountability, creating spaces where people feel they can share their ‘true’ experiences is critical. This means building high levels of trust, and the stakeholder group were integral to this.

One of the ways the relationship can be ‘worked at’ is to constantly negotiate and share the purpose of the research. Lyons and LaBoskey (2002) describe this as ‘explaining ourselves’, ‘finding many places to explain to others what we are doing’. We encouraged response communities – ‘ongoing places where we can give accounts of developing work overtime. As the explaining takes place, clarification and shaping of purpose occurs’ (Dahlberg 1995). This has significant implications for narrative inquiry research, and Clandinin and Connelly (2000) suggest that the purpose can change over time within narrative inquiries.

The purpose, and what one is exploring and finds puzzling, changes as the research progresses. This happens from day to day and week to week, and it happens over the long haul as narratives are retold, puzzles shift, and purposes change. (Connelly and Clandinin 2006 p. 71)

This is significantly different from quantitative methodologies, in which a hypothesis is developed and tested to either prove or disprove it. Within this project the funding body was initially drawn to more quantitative methodologies. However, after conversation and consideration, the hope that data could be collected that would give insight into realities and contexts through lived experiences was realized as value adding. In the end this proved valuable to the funding body, who used the data to inform policy decision making.

Temporality

Clandinin and Connelly (2000) suggest that being a narrative inquirer is much more than ‘listening’ to stories; it is about understanding identities in their full social context. To encapsulate the social context, Clandinin and Connelly offer a three-dimensional framework that takes into account interactions, continuities and situations:

Inquiries are personal and social (interaction); past, present and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation). This set of terms creates a metaphorical three-dimensional Narrative Inquiry space, with temporality along one dimension, the personal and social along a second dimension and place along a third. (p. 73)

Further they suggest four directions of inquiry:

Inward and outward, backward and forward. By inward, we mean toward the internal conditions, such as feeling, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions. By outward, we mean toward the existential conditions, that is the environment. By backward and forward, we refer to temporality—past, present and future. (p. 73)

Therefore, narrative inquirers are charged with a much greater task than simply collecting and representing the individual story at a point in time. Narrative inquiry is about understanding the research participants’ story at a point in time, within the social context, taking account of historical influences, and considering future paths. This, we understand as temporality.

Valuing temporality was a key decision within this research project. The questions we asked our participants were carefully considered in order to elicit not only what participants were doing, but also to discover the influences that impacted the pedagogical decisions they were making. Stories that considered temporality offered contextual insight into practice and valuing experience and understanding factors which influenced the practice. For example, Mary offered one storied snapshot to demonstrate how temporality influenced understanding:

My first six years of my career were spent in a prep class. The first two in [place name] where most students were native English speakers. The second two years were in [place name] where almost all students had a language background other than English. (Mary)

What Mary went on to share with us was how these early experiences shaped and influenced her teaching of phonics in context. As researchers, understanding elements of her professional history enabled us to better understand elements of resistance Mary raised as she grappled with the professional learning programme of which she was a part.

Mary was not the only participant who drew on her past to inform her current practice, as Michelle’s comment demonstrates:

My earliest recollections of teaching phonics were with teaching a letter/sound each week. We did lots of thematic activities with the letter of the week. lots of cutting and pasting from magazines of things that began with that letter. (Michelle)

We share these snippets of stories to demonstrate how valuing temporality allowed a more nuanced interpretation of current experience. At scale, this allowed a level of generalized interpretation, which helped inform a systems conversation, but at a small-scale level it helped us understand experiences. Combined, we were able to offer a complex interpretation of influencing factors over time.

Too often in education, professional learning disregards the influence of background experience, and demands that teachers adopt ‘new ways’ that are seen as ‘best ways’ (Lyons 2014). This mindset is often in conflict with learning theory and change management theory (Lyons 2014). Understanding the lived experiences, the temporality of the experiences, and how they interact with current practice enables insights into aspirations and into not only how the professional learning is being understood and enacted, but why such decisions are being made.

Landscapes

Narrative inquiry is about understanding a person’s story in its social landscape (Lyons and LaBoskey 2002). Consequently, the researcher is attuned to the influence of social context. Landscape is the social context in which the experience is being lived (Wells 2011). Within this project we were interested in participants’ pedagogical beliefs and practices associated with the teaching of phonics within their social context. Acknowledging such practices are influenced by many factors, two of which are lived experiences and pedagogical values informed by experiences, we needed to find ways to both capture and understand not only people’s current landscapes, but the landscapes they had traversed over the course of their professional lives. We also needed to understand the impact of different theories of literacy on their views and practices around the teaching of phonics.

We began this by entering the landscape at the time of formal professional learning with participants (as they were engaged in the Phonics in Context professional learning programme). We listened to their stories as they shared not only their current practices around teaching phonics, but also their experiences of how they became teachers of phonics. We also shared our stories. We sought to understand, value and appreciate the landscapes of which participants were a part by asking participants to share their landscapes with us. Participants appreciated the notion that while we were not necessarily ‘one of them’, we understood what it was to be ‘one of them’. That is, participants valued the researchers’ understanding of the school landscape and the recognition that the teaching of phonics did not happen in an isolated bubble, rather in a dynamic and rapidly changing landscape. As one of the participant’s noted: ‘it is lovely to see Monash researchers here with us’ (Mary).

This notion of ‘walking with’ participants implies our valuing their landscape. As researchers interested in pedagogical practices at a moment in time, we knew that histories would partly inform current practice, and therefore if we were to accurately present pedagogical practices and views at a point in time, we needed to understand, in this instance, the contested notions of phonics, and appreciate not only current landscapes, but the landscapes that had been experienced before. This was a critical part of our research puzzle. Participants were geographically scattered, and we simply did not have the resources to engage in understanding the differing landscapes in person, and so we turned to technology to help us capture this part of the inquiry. We used reflective prompts to encourage participants to share their current and previous landscapes with us. The reflective prompt we used was: ‘Thinking back over your career, can you offer some reflections on how you have taught phonics? Were there factors that influenced your teaching of phonics?’ This was followed by a second reflective prompt that asked participants to reflect back over their teaching of phonics in context during the research period and to offer two or three changes they had made as a consequence of their learning and to describe the impact these changes had on student learning.

As researchers, what this offered us was insight into the landscapes in which people were working and had worked. The landscapes offered storied practices of how pedagogies had evolved and factors that had influenced practices associated with the teaching of phonics. Below are two examples of stories that capture previous landscapes.

Over the years I’ve taught phonics in a variety ways. From a spelling workbook in the USA where I would teach a whole class lesson/rule through our reading in an English book. The students had a spelling book that was linked to the readings. They had activities such as breaking down the sounds in words, working on spelling patterns, word meanings, etc. The students worked their way through the book throughout the year. (Paul)

My first year of teaching was in a prep classroom and every Friday afternoon we did our black board for the following week’s sound – letter in the middle and words and pictures around it. We taught the five vowels, a as in apple etc. we then taught p, t and m, etc. pa-t, ta p, ma-t, po-p, mo-p and p-at, t-ap, m-at, p-op, m-op, t-op etc. building up the vocab that way. Friday morning was assessment time for the sound we had taught during the week. (Amelia)

This data helped us understand the historical influences of practice, and how participants came to see and engage with the teaching of phonics as a consequence of the landscapes of which they had been a part.

The following two snapshots of experience demonstrate how we came to understand the current landscape and how the professional learning had influenced the landscape of phonics teaching and learning.

The impact of this work has led to increased teacher knowledge of curriculum content and effective pedagogy. It has also assisted to develop more consistent practices between classrooms. Teachers are becoming more comfortable in using evidence to inform teaching decisions. (Kim)

When working in Professional Team Meetings and Facilitated Planning times we have endeavoured to; provide professional reading and discussion around ideas related to teaching, for example, the importance of oral language in early literacy, and taken time to discuss data from students … especially pre- and post-assessment data. (Hayley)

These snapshots give insight into how a storied landscape, which includes past and present landscapes, can be captured. Appreciating the landscape of practices allowed us to glean insight into factors that influenced teaching practice. Professional learning and practice are always informed by prior knowledge and experiences (Lyons 2015). Too often we make pedagogical research judgements based on a snapshot of time and place, discarding the landscapes that influenced the participant. Appreciating the professional landscapes of which the participants were a part offered nuance to the research questions. In fact, as we began to analyse the data that reported on practice, we could see evidence of how lived experiences were influencing both the interpretation of the professional learning and also the enactment of practice. While this research project had a large number of participants for a narrative inquiry, we chose to look at individual narratives of practice and themed narratives of practice. This is perhaps not ‘traditional’ in narrative inquiry, but what it allowed in this project was consistent themes of practice to be identified, as well as individual factors that influenced those themes, ultimately providing a more nuanced insight into the impact of present landscapes.

Competing stories and representing the less dominant voices

The school sector responsible for funding the Phonics in Context programme was also the authority most interested in its success, and part of that success would be measured through understanding the experiences of practitioners. However, what quickly became evident was that there was an opaque voice that was dominant in the context. As a research team, we needed to understand that dominant voice, its impact on the participants, and find ways to safely represent the voices of individuals who were not dominant. This is often referred to in narrative literature as tensions within storied landscapes (Lyons 2015). Connelly and Clandinin (2006) suggest that tensions occur when ‘the possibility of competing and conflicting stories emerges’ (p. 50). Competing stories are those that ‘live in dynamic but positive tension with dominant stories of school whereas conflicting stories collide with dominant stories of school’ (p. 81).

There was evidence in this project of competing stories. The dominant story was how phonics in context could be taught and its possibilities. The less dominant stories were the uncomfortable stories, and they impacted the purity of the vision. Often these stories are dismissed or used against the less dominate voices. Yet it is often these voices that shine light into dark places where the derailing factors sit. Samantha offered one such example:

The number of students within the group also increased as the year progressed. It went from starting at three, to extending to five students. In the future, I would try to make the groups smaller in size as I don’t believe having five students in the group was as successful. However, with the teacher pressures of time and behaviour management, I wasn’t able to extend my two teacher groups a day to three. (Samantha)

Pressures of time and behaviour management were not part of the Phonics in Context programme. Yet anyone working in schools will appreciate these are real factors. Considering competing stories as legitimate factors for the effectiveness of the programme produces a more nuanced and complex analysis of the data.

Further, this research project was interested in the lived experiences of participants, which meant offering participants the opportunity to speak back to the dominant voice. The professional development programme was indeed the dominant voice; this was echoed by departmental personnel who had invested into its merit, and school leaders who had agreed to be part of the project. Speaking back to such dominant voices needed to be managed carefully, but it was critical if we were to truly understand how phonics in context was being experienced and taught. For example, Thomas offered the following:

At the moment, the approach I have adapted from [Professional Learning] lacks advice in terms of catering for the teaching students who are non-verbal or present language issues, as this impacts their ability to pronounce the letter sounds in printed text. (Thomas)

We can read this snapshot of Thomas’ narrative dismissively, yet it took courage for Thomas to point out ‘what was missing’ from his perspective. He was talking back to the dominant voices. What he was saying mattered and impacted the experience of both the professional learning and the enactment of the professional learning.

Dominant stories exist in every discourse and they can often be hard to infiltrate. Narrative inquiry seeks to explore the tensions that exist between the dominant stories and the hidden stories, as well as the tensions created between the dominant stories and the lived experiences of the individuals who collectively help create them. Considering these tensions in a figurative manner may result in a formulation such as this:

Tensions could be seen as the cracks in what might, at first glance, be a smooth story. Beginning to attend to the cracks creates the possible spaces for inquiry. It is in the cracks where inquiry spaces are made possible, that is, where there is possibility for retelling lives. (Clandinin and Connelly 2000 p. 84)

Thus, to better understand the ‘cracks’ in dominant stories, then present and theorize them, allows a more holistic picture to be considered and assessed. Valuing the stories of experience and practice, and considering the factors that impact and influence them, encourages a better understanding of the dominant story.

Practicing narrative inquiry across a large size and scale – affordances for educational research demonstrated by this study

We began this paper by posting a curiosity question, namely, could the principles of narrative inquiry be employed to examine professional learning and approaches to the teaching of phonics within a large sample size, over broad geographical spaces at different points in time. The specific principles of narrative inquiry on which we drew were relationality, temporality, landscapes and competing stories. We assert that indeed we were true to these epistemological aspects of narrative inquiry, but within an unusual method framework. Three significant themes were identified within this research project that influence the teaching of phonics in primary schools and highlight the merit of narrative inquiry at scale.

Theme 1: Narrative inquiry demonstrated the value teachers placed on the teaching of phonics ‘in context’ as a pedagogical approach to literacy teaching

Narrative inquiry, drawing across a series of email prompts, allowed us to consider past and present practice where participants described their pedagogical preference of teaching phonics as integrated in reading and writing contexts. It allowed us to demonstrate not just ‘what’ achievement gains were made by students based on a particular approach, but also the ‘thinking’ in which 45 teachers from 20 school sites (as pedagogical experts) engaged as they practiced their craft. Narrative inquiry offered an insider’s perspective around how and why pedagogical decisions were being made, alongside an opportunity to compare and contrast the reasoning around the factors that influenced these decisions, and a reflection on the overall effectiveness of the pedagogical enactments.

Theme 2: Narrative inquiry allowed a nuanced and complex representation of teacher identity – and how this influenced professional learning and the teaching of phonics

Narrative inquiry captured and presented professional identity, allowing a more personal and personalized insight into pedagogy and teacher professional learning. Walking with participants, both in a face-to-face context and in a virtual space, created the opportunity to understand how teachers were constructing their identities as teachers of phonics and as teachers more generally, the messages they were hearing during professional development, and the factors that influenced the enactment of their professional learning. Walking with participants meant that the data were ‘living’, meaning that we were not just looking at static numbers or transcripts, rather, we were ‘feeling’, ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ the data. The combined voices of the participants providing powerful force for affirmation teachers’ work and sector recognition the learning translations into practice.

Theme 3: Narrative inquiry offered teacher voice into policy decision making

In an era of high stakes policy accountability, where teachers are feeling more and more disempowered and undervalued, adopting research agendas that report and present the experiences of teacher practice seems essential (Topsfield 2012). Anecdotal findings from this study and presented in this paper suggest teachers appreciated their practice and their views being valued as part of the evaluation of the programme, which at scale influenced and informed sector wide reforms. Continuing to find cost-effective ways to collect, analyse and report on the experiences of teachers not only adds a critical lens to any policy and or pedagogical implementation, it also recognizes and values the nuanced work that teachers undertake within context and time.

Concluding remarks – limitations of narrative inquiry at scale and future narrative inquiry methodological directions

The narrative inquiry method employed within this study afforded an unusually large number of people to tell their stories and locate their stories within the contentious debates of how best to teach phonics in Australia. Clandidin and Rosiek remind us that, ‘people tell stories about their experiences because it helps them to explicate the meaning of their experiences to others. Therefore, when people communicate through stories, they will naturally include the inner-workings of their social, cultural and institutional milieu’ (2007, p. 42). Indeed, this is what a narrative inquiry method at scale afforded us. The data from this research project enabled us to interact more constructively within the traditional ‘reading wars’ debates (Castles et al. 2018). Rather than binary positions, this narrative inquiry offered glimpses into how and why teachers were making pedagogical decisions and practicing pedagogical enactments. As Lim et al. (2022) remind us, narrative inquiry as methodology enables us to privilege teacher voice and to acknowledge that teachers bear the repercussions of policy implementations. This places teachers in an optimal space to explain how professional inquiry has been or is being implemented as a form of teacher learning in schools (p. 124). The contribution this paper has tried to explore is how many teacher voices might be captured and represented at scale, without diluting what the point that Lim and colleagues identify.

Whilst there were strengths to this method design, we also acknowledge the limitations of what and how we practiced narrative inquiry within this project. This project challenged us to explore how narrative inquiry as a methodology might be employed beyond the traditional parameters of size and scope. From the outset, we sought to capture stories of experience, cognizant of the epistemological signposts that make narrative inquiry such an impactful methodology. The evidence from this project demonstrates some evidence that experience can be captured in multimodal ways, that relationships can be forged through a mix of modalities, and that temporal awareness can be woven within the architecture of the digital design of the project. However, we are aware that there are aspects of narrative inquiry as methodology that were more challenging to achieve within this project; for example, a project that had geographical breadth with large numbers of participants made it challenging to fully appreciate the social fabric within which phonics was being taught. The nuanced moments that are so rich in school contexts were harder to excavate from the narratives of practice, although not impossible. And the relationships that are so fundamental to quality narrative inquiries were more digital in nature.

As we look to the future, we are reflective of the limitations that we identified, and are interested in exploring each of the limitations in depth to better understand the contextual dimensions of these limitations and to theoretically explore potential epistemological practices that might address the limitations identified. Narrative inquiry has always been a nimble methodology that locates itself within contexts and communities. Consequently, we are keen to explore the context of the third decade of the twenty-first century and to epistemologically engage critically with how narrative inquiry might continue to evolve, respectful of its philosophical, epistemological, ontological and methodological roots.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Catholic Education Melbourne.