n Education as Change - Quality research about learning and teaching : new prospects for the narrative as research tool

Abstract

Learning and teaching research has for a long time ascribed unequal roles to researcher and researched. Recently, however, this situation has changed dramatically and teachers, the researched, have become equal partners to the researchers, usually academics at institutions of higher learning. This paper argues that these new roles and positions the two parties have to fulfill have to be negotiated continually. It describes a research project in which in-service teachers were engaged in using a powerful research tool, the narrative, as bargaining position. The paper points out that although teachers were enthusiastic about the narrative as research tool, their own narratives were used in a limited way because they failed to contextualise their experiences. As a result their narratives remained descriptive and not analytical, and consequently, showed limited prospects as research tools.