learningforsustainability.netHome » Research approaches » Narrative
Using narrative and stories to help learning
Narrative approaches are growing in popularity and are becoming more accepted in the research sector. Stories are particularly useful for giving voices to marginalised groups, and working with pluralistic perspectives.
- Using Narrative Methods to Link Program Evaluation and Organization Development Narrative methods represent a form of inquiry that has promise for integrating evaluation and organization development. In this paper, Charles McClintock - Dean of the Fielding Graduate Institute’s School of Human and Organization Development - illustrates how narrative methods can link a program’s evaluation and its organization development.
- Researching Organisational Change and Learning: A Narrative Approach This paper by Carl Rhodes (The Qualitative Report, Volume 2, Number 4, December, 1996) explores a qualitative research approach to organisational change and learning based on the gathering and reporting of stories. Particular emphasis is placed on reporting research findings in the "voices" of the organisational actors involved in the research. The paper starts by identifying learning, socialisation and diversity as a context for research and goes on to examine the power relations implicit in organisational learning. A pluralistic approach to the use of storytelling in organisational analysis is discussed and a research process is described. Issues of how research findings are represented are examined as are some unresolved and potentially unresolvable problems with narrative based research.
- Using Narrative Inquiry to Explore Career Choice in Social Work: A Letter of Lived Experience In this paper then, the author has chosen to describe the challenges and the delights of using a narrative approach to explore students' career choice stories. Through the use of letter as a literary device, the author also recounts my research experience to highlight what I have learnt about narrative as a research method and to draw attention to the impact of gendered ways of knowing and important themes that emerge from past, present and future individual/familial, community and professional contexts.
- Bramble Bushes in a Thicket: Narrative and the intangibles of learning networks
In this paper Cynthia F. Kurtz and David J. Snowden explore how inter-organisational learning networks affect three systemic attributes of well-functioning organisations which are not often considered in value propositions for such networks: identity management, trust negotiation, and productive conflict. They consider how narrative participates in each of the network effects of identity, trust and conflict, and how that participation can best be supported to maximize these intangible yet strong elements of value afforded by inter-organisational networks.