Sistemas de lodos activados sin clarificación primaria

Narrative inquiry is a research approach that enables an understanding of experience as lived and told stories. By listening to and including children’s stories in the research text, their experiences are validated. Establishing a collaborative research relationship takes time and space and involves the researcher developing skills as an active listener, whereby strengthening the students’ voice. Paley (1986) describes an important factor in listening is curiosity whereby creating a climate where children expose “ideas I did not imagine they held” (p. 125). She observed that the stories “tumbled out as if they simply had been waiting for me to stop talking and begin listening” (p. 125). Thus, listening to the stories of four adolescents and those close to them in a New Zealand context, and giving them a public voice complements the existing research on the friendships and social relationships of adolescents by addressing the lack of contextual information (McGregor & Vogelsberg, 1998).

I have described the first stage of this research journey in my Narrative Beginnings where I presented my stories of experience and narratives that situated me as a student, a teacher, and a parent: through these stories I described how my experiences shaped my research question and I identified who I am as a researcher in the midst of this research study. This led me to the second stage of my study as I searched the literature on friendships, social relationships, and the experiences of students with disabilities in secondary schools.

In this chapter I first of all explain the qualitative research methodology used in this study. I chose a narrative inquiry methodology to answer my research question, “What are the social experiences of four students with disabilities in New Zealand secondary schools; and what factors shape these relationships”, because this methodology “deals with the

personal construction of past experiences” (Josselson & Lieblich, 2003, p. 266). The main purpose of the research is to document and give voice to some of the experiences that four students with a disability have of friendship and social relationships in their school context. I aim to foreground their perspectives and identify issues, so that teachers can reflect how their own pedagogy and the formal and informal discourses of their schools can support these relationships alongside academic learning. As Gemma, one the participants, said to me as I left after the fourth interview, “I hope the teachers will think about what it is like for someone with a disability, and that they might be getting picked on.”

As I indicated at the beginning of Chapter One, the work of Clandinin and Connelly resonated with my experiences and my aims for this study. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) developed a model of narrative inquiry in their research with teachers drawing on previously published work (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 1986; 1990; 1994; Clandinin, Davies, Hogan, & Kennard, 1993; Connelly & Clandinin, 1986; 1987; 1990; 1999). It is a methodological model that is still in progress, as more researchers listen to participants’ stories and write research texts of their experiences - “We are in a fluid time” (J. Clandinin, personal communication, May 3, 2002). Their writing has provided me with a scaffolded, logical design and a personal experience method that is congruent with my research question. Narrative inquiry is a process that enables me to listen to stories and build narratives of students’ experiences on the landscapes where they live and learn.5

In the second part of the chapter, I describe the third (entering the field) and fourth (listening to stories) stages of my journey that began as I moved into the field and approached and negotiated with schools to select

5 _{Clandinin and Connelly (2000) use the term “on the landscape” to describe “place” – the}

third dimension of The Three Dimensional Inquiry Space that I describe later in this chapter. The other dimensions are “temporality (past, present, and future)” and “personal (inward) and social (outward).”

four students to participate and share their experiences with me. This process took eighteen months as I established relationships with the students I interviewed, three of them four times over two academic years, and one student only three times as she passed away before the fourth interview. In this section, I introduce the four students to the readers. The fourth stage of my research journey ran concurrently with the third stage as I gathered and composed field texts as I listened to multiple voices, observed in schools, and collected relevant documents to contextualise the students’ stories – a process Richardson (2000) calls “crystallization” (p. 934). (During the third and fourth stages of the journey I wrote field-notes, transcribed the taped interviews, listened and re-listened to the stories and wrote responses and journal entries). Then in the last parts of the chapter I explain how in the final leg of my study I moved from field texts to the research text as I analysed and coded the transcripts using the N6 version in the NUD*IST (Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing) series software (Richards, 2002), and constructed the research text which presents the students’ stories in poetic form followed by my narrative response to each student’s stories. In the final chapter, I explore some of the themes that emerged from the stories of the four students.

Before I explain and analyse my research methods, I describe the narrative inquiry methodology and my justification for choosing it for this study.