Some narrative researchers (Labov & Waletzky, 1967/2003; McAdams, 1993) argue that stories or narratives can fairly easily be isolated from general talk by looking for certain consistent structural features, for example, using Labov and Waletzky’s (1967/2003)
118
orientation; complication; evaluation, and coda, or, McAdams’s (1993) setting; characters; initiating event; attempt (at attaining a goal); consequence; reaction; and denouement.
While others (Bamberg, 2006a; 2006b; Georgakopoulou, 2006; 2008; Leggo, 2008) hold that not all stories or narratives show such easily discernable structural features. Leggo (2008) argued that much of the process of story-making defies rules and guidelines; describing the process as “idiosyncratic, always changing, culturally conditioned, *and+ creatively organic” (p. 10). He explained as follows:
[T]here are no rules of story-making that cannot be contravened all the time. Effective story-telling often depends on the contravention of conventions. And certainly how stories are told in one cultural community will differ from the ways stories are told in another cultural community. So, writers and readers need an openness to the possibilities of what a story is and can be (Leggo, 2008, p. 11).
If, however, one is searching for stories that shape the professional identities of mathematics teachers, then a good starting point would be to search for “turning points” (Denzin, 1989; Kelchtermans, 1993; McCormak, 2000; Bruner, 2001; Drake, 2006; Mishler, 2006), which is an important feature of all life history narratives. The notion that individual lives are shaped and permanently marked by significant events or turning points or “epiphanies” (Denzin, 1989, p. 22), is deeply entrenched in Western thought (Denzin, 1989; Bruner, 2001). The importance of turning points in narrative studies in general, and its particular relevance in this study, is evident in the way it is defined:
By ‘turning points’ I mean those episodes in which, as if to underline the power of the agent’s intentional states, the narrator attributes a crucial change or stance in the protagonist’s story to a belief, a conviction, a thought. This I see as crucial to the effort to individualize a life, to make it clearly and patently something more than a running off of automatic, folk-psychological canonicity (Bruner, 2001, pp. 31-32).
McCormack (2000), for example, described turning points as “significant moments” that lead the teller “to tell other stories about what happened before or after these moments” (p. 287). In this study, ‘turning points’ is an important feature of the kinds of narratives that shape the professional identities of mathematics teachers. Kelchtermans (1993) explained: “They *turning points+ create a problem or question the normal, routine behaviour. The teacher feels forced to react by reassessing certain ideas or opinions, by changing elements of his professional behaviour, and so on” (p. 446). Bruner (2001) added:
119
They [turning points] represent a way in which people free themselves in their self-consciousness from their history, their banal destiny, their conventionality. In doing so, they mark off the narrator’s consciousness from the protagonist’s and begin closing the gap between the two at the same time. Tuning points are steps toward narratorial consciousness. Not surprising that, in most autobiographies, they are located at points where the culture in fact gives more degrees of freedom – elbow room for turning points (pp. 32-33).
In other words, turning points are events that interviewees would recall as:
[C]hanging their understanding of their past experiences ... open[ing] up directions of movement that were not anticipated by them and could not be predicted by their previous views of their pasts, leading to a different sense of themselves and to changes that were consequential for how they felt and what they did... Sometimes these turning points lead to restorying of the past and the adoption of a new identity that changes the meaning of past relationships (Mishler, 2006, p. 39).
Crossley (2000), for example, argued that the experience of a traumatic event (like a serious illness) is instrumental in facilitating an appreciation of the way in which human life is routinely narratively configured. Such a traumatic event can be a turning point, especially when it “serves to fundamentally disrupt the routine and orderly sense of existence, throwing into radical doubt our taken-for-granted assumptions about time, identity, meaning and life itself” (Crossley, 2000, p. 542). Thereafter, narratives are used “to restore a sense of order and connection, and thus to re-establish a semblance of meaning in the life of the individual” (Crossley, 2000, p. 542). In the process structures and meanings that otherwise would remain implicit and unrecognized is explicated. Drake’s (2006) explanation is more specific to mathematics teaching and learning:
Turning-point stories are those stories in which an individual’s very negative early experiences with learning and teaching mathematics have recently been transformed by an experience (the turning point) in which the teacher’s understandings about mathematics, learning mathematics, and teaching mathematics changed substantially (p. 589).
The allure of considering narratives of turning points in this study lies in the ‘change’ in the stories and hence in the professional identities of the participants “as they re-interpret their identities as mathematics learners and teachers” (p. 591). I am contending that, the stories that are most likely to shape the professional identities of mathematics teachers are the ones about turning points experienced in their professional careers. Therefore, in one of the interview questions, the participants in this study were specifically asked to reflect on an event that they consider to have been a turning point in their professional careers. As
120
Denzin (1989) aptly observed, “biographical texts will typically be structured by significant, turning-point moments in a subject’s life” (p. 22). Moreover, Kelchtermans (1993) added the notion of “critical person” (p. 446); explaining that: “Critical persons are referred to by the teachers as having had an important impact on their career” (p. 446).
3.5.3
„Big stories‟ versus „small stories‟
What counts as a ‘story’ in narrative research may vary, depending on the methodological field (Savin-Baden & Van Niekerk, 2007), but also cultural and linguistic perspectives or narrative form (Bruner, 2004). For example, in some cultures stories have a specific format: beginning, middle, and end, following from dominant Western traditional discourses of what a self-story should look like (Sermijn, Devlieger, & Loots, 2008, p. 3). Other, non- Western cultures may follow a different format, for example: “Some cultures tell stories that are open-ended explorations of thoughts and events combined” (Marlett & Emes, 2010, p. 137) and such stories may be “neither completely coherent nor completely linearly structured around one plot” (Sermijn, Devlieger, & Loots, 2008, p. 3). As Bruner (2004) pointed out: “People anywhere can tell you some intelligible account of their lives. What varies is the cultural and linguistic perspective of narrative form in which it is formulated and expressed. And that too will be found to spring from historical circumstances as these have been incorporated in the culture and language of a people” (p. 695). According to Sermijn, Devlieger and Loots (2008) the so called “untamed stories” (p. 3) of postmodernism stems from the idea that traditional story characteristics are not inherent in the stories themselves, neither in people who tell them, but rather in the sociocultural traditions in which the stories are embedded. They argued that, from a postmodern perspective, “narrative characteristics are not inherent in human nature, *and therefore+ a universal definition of the essence of a story is impossible” (p. 4). This “vagueness and lack of boundaries” (p. 4) associated with the postmodern notion of story makes it difficult to identify a story.
The postmodern notion values the acceptance of everything that does not fit in a streamlined story, of the story elements that do not find a place in a traditional story structure. Just like the motif of a patchwork quilt, a postmodern story is characterized not by an embroidered, continuous pattern but by the juxtaposition of more or less disjunctive elements (Sermijn, Devlieger, & Loots, 2008, p. 4).
121
Bamberg (2006a), for example, distinguished between ‘big stories’ and ‘small stories’. He explained that ‘big stories’ are typically elicited during interviews for research or therapy purposes, and that these are “stories in which speakers are asked to retrospect on particular life-determining episodes or on their lives as a whole, and tie together events into episodes and episodes into a life story, so that something like ‘a life’ can come ‘to existence’” (p. 64). In contrast, ‘small stories’ are usually very short, and refers to “stories told in interaction; stories that do not necessarily thematize (sic) the speaker, definitely not the whole life, but possibly not even events that the speaker has lived through – and now, retrospectively, reflects upon and recounts” (p. 63). Furthermore, “‘small stories’ are more the kinds of stories we tell in everyday settings... are most often about very mundane things and everyday occurrences, often even not particularly interesting or tellable (sic); stories that seem to pop up, not even recognised as stories and quickly forgotten; nothing permanent or of particular importance” (p. 63); the kind of stories that are largely neglected in narrative research. Leggo (2008), referring to the former as “mundane events” (p. 4), pointed out however that, “the mundane events of our lives are already stories, but they are only invested with significance in the ways they are told” (p. 4). Bamberg (2004) explained in an earlier publication how these ‘small stories’, “the ones we tell in passing, in our everyday encounters with each other (stories which I *Bamberg+ would like to consider the ‘real’ stories of our lived lives), become secondary to a degree that they appear irrelevant for the biography researcher who is interested (only) in what narrators pick to integrate into their life stories” (p. 356, emphasis in original). To a certain extent then, these small stories are akin to what Savin-Baden and Van Niekerk (2007) referred to as “interruptions of reflection in a storied life” (p. 464). Georgakopoulou (2006) described ‘small stories’ as “an umbrella- term that covers a gamut of under-represented narrative activities, such as telling of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to telling, deferrals from telling, and refusals to tell” (p. 123). The highly interactional features of ‘small stories’ which “typically involve recent or planned imminent interactions” (p. 10) can be used to distinguish them from ‘big stories’ in research. Narrative research, especially biographic-narrative research, often celebrates ‘big stories’ at the expense of everyday ‘small stories’; an exclusion which often forfeits the researcher the opportunity to take full advantage of what narrative inquiry really has to offer (Bamberg, 2006a; Georgakopoulou,
122
2006; 2008). Georgakopoulou (2006) suggested that ‘small stories’ might be the meeting point where narrative inquiry (using narrative as a method – a means to an end) and narrative analysis (prioritizing the ‘how’ in narratives – the narrative being the end in itself) meet. As Sermijn, Devlieger, and Loots (2008) explained, the vision of a narrative self as a postmodern story “is related to the postmodern idea that the self has no stable core but is multiple, multivoiced, discontinuous, and fragmented” (p. 5) adding that “the post modern story notion clearly fits better with daily narrative practice than the traditional story notion” (p. 5) and concluding that, “the postmodern notion creates space for alternative story structures that connect better with the daily narrative practices we come in contact with as researchers” (p. 5). I found the following comment made by Polkinghorne (1991) about the process of narrative structuring particularly useful: “The process of constructing one’s own self-story differs in significant ways from the process by which literary authors construct novels that use imaginative settings, characters, and events” (p. 146). He explained that:
Unlike historians and novelsits, we are not configuring events that are already completed of those over which we have imaginative control. We are in the middle of our own stories, and we do not controll all the circumstances that affect the outcome of those stories. We do have to revise our plots when events impose themselves in such a way that we cannot complete the story as planned (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 146).
I found this useful because, as an avid reader myself, I was indeed expecting novel-like narrative structures in my interviews with the teachers; and yet, I found very few of these amongst the collected interview data.