CLINICA ARMSTRONG INTERNACIONAL

After the initial interview, I drew upon Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) three-

dimensional inquiry to organize the conversations that I had with each participant. Clandinin and Connelly laid out “terms” for narrative inquiry that allow researchers to investigate people’s experiences as ongoing, multilayered, and contextualized events. This metaphorical space

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considers “interaction, continuity or temporality, and situation through personal practical knowledge and the professional knowledge landscape of the individual” (Ollerenshaw &

Creswell, 2002, p. 342). It allows researchers to examine relationships between people’s feelings and their larger social lives, it accounts for current experiences in relation to people’s past and how these experiences could shape their futures.

This approach allows for four directions of inquiry: inward, outward, backward, and forward. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) explained this approach:

By inward, we mean toward the internal conditions, such as feelings, 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. We wrote that to experience and experience—that is to do research into an experience—is to experience it simultaneously in these four ways and to ask questions pointing each way. Thus, when one is positioned on this two-dimensional space in any particular inquiry, one asks questions, collects field notes, derives interpretations, and writes a research text that addresses both personal and social issues by looking inward and outward, and addresses temporal issues by looking not only to the event but to its past and to its future. (p. 50)

The first two dimensions of this approach focus on the inward experiences and environments that inform participants’ responses. These include the ideas that they bring to the study about writing and their experiences both in COMM1085 and prior to the course. They involve the research environment, the college environment, and the settings that informed COMM1085 for these students. The backward and forward aspects of these dimensions involve participants’ experiences with writing over time.

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The third dimension considers what is unsaid. It considers “the ambiguity, complexity, difficulty, and uncertainties associated with the doing of the inquiry” (p. 55). This approach, which is applied in Clandinin and Huber (2002) to “see the unfolding (temporal), situatedness (place) of stories to live by” (p. 167), enables researchers to examine participant stories in terms of both personal and social complexity. It allows researchers to consider events beyond the present experience. It also allows researchers to explore the research process, implementing a degree of reflexivity and flexibility to adapt to the shifting nature of the personal experiences that influence the stories and data collected. It was particularly important when I was revisiting transcripts and conversations before the focus group and the second interviews. Considering what was unsaid or implied allowed me to generate new questions and to follow up with participants to generate deeper discussions on topics where we may have touched only the surface in our initial discussions.

This three-dimensional inquiry was used after each interview. After an interview was transcribed, I organized a chart with columns indicating forward, backward, inward, and outward. I then organized quotes from the transcripts into these categories. The reasons for this approach are three-fold. First, organizing the chart and using it to develop the preliminary narrative allowed me to organize questions and activities for the second interviews and for the focus group. The patterns traced using the three-dimensional framework influenced what thematic links participants and I discussed in subsequent research stages.

The second reason was that it allowed me to see where participants were inadvertently telling me what I wanted to hear and where I, lost in the enthusiasm of the conversation, may have inadvertently encouraged them to answer in this way. This was particularly true whenever we compared my COMM1085 class more favourably than other writing classes they had taken.

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While these aspects of our conversations stroked my ego, they never went beyond surface-level analysis. Applying three-dimensional analysis allowed me to recognize what was happening and design my second interview questions and focus group activities more broadly so that we

focused less on my teaching successes and more on factors related to programmatic curricula, such as rubrics, iterative writing opportunities, and grade distribution. I also encouraged participants to discuss moments in the previous discussions where they seemed overly- diplomatic in their responses; where it seemed like they were stopping short in an answer

because they did not want to insult me or the course. In this sense, the research process extended to the third dimension (what is unsaid/silent) because it pushed the participants and I reflect critically about the experiences we discussed.

The third reason I used this three dimensional approach is so that I could make my analytical methods overt for participants. I used the chart that I produced in relation to the preliminary narrative so that participants could see how the narrative was constructed and how the analysis materialized. This allowed us to scrutinize the narrative on more equal footing where both parties understood how their words were interpreted for the narrative.

This three-dimensional inquiry was useful through the first interview, my analysis, as well as two elements that I will discuss in stage five: creating the preliminary narrative and scrutinizing this preliminary narrative. This approach also helped to refine my approach to the second interview and focus group activities. Since these two stages built upon the three-

dimensional framework, the results were added to the pre-existing framework to analyze the new results. The three-dimensional inquiry evolved beyond finding patterns and making research visible to participants. It became a way to trace changes in the themes and to scrutinize where they overlapped.

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