Narrative Inquiry, Autoethnography, and Moral

Purpose

Jim Lane, Ed.D.The Qualitative Report

Sixth Annual ConferenceJanuary 10, 2015

Personal History

• Experienced death of my mother and my father’s two disastrous marriages.

• Observed my father’s professional failures.• Experienced both middle class comfort and

economic hardships.• As a young adult struggled with spiritual

questions.

My Background

• Free-lance Magazine Writer• High School English Teacher 11 years • Middle School Assistant Principal 7 years• Principal Orange Pines Middle School 7 years• Principal Meeks Middle School 3 years

Problem

The turbulent sea of school reform is fraught with storms of individual and group conflicts. In order to effectively navigate these tempests, school based leaders must understand their ethical beliefs, and then use them to work toward a set of desired end results.

Study Purpose

The purpose of this autoethnographic narrative inquiry was for me to describe and explain how I discovered, constructed, and refined my sense of moral purpose as a principal during my seven-year tenure at Orange Pines Middle School, in order to advance my understanding of values-based school leadership.

Contributions to Professional Literature

This study contributes to professional literature by showing focused insights into how ethical conflicts and dilemmas school principals face during their daily practice can shape and guide their moral pursuit of effective school reform. It also shows how theoretical knowledge can inform professional practice.

Guiding Questions

• How did I discover, construct, and refine my professional identity as a morally directed leader during my seven-year tenure as principal of Orange Pines Middle School?– How did my previous experiences and values

guide the construction of my sense of moral purpose at Orange Pines Middle?

– How did I use interactions in critical ethical dilemmas to construct self-knowledge and understanding and define my values as a morally directed school leader?

Ethical Frameworks

Starratt proposes a multidimensional framework that combines several ethical themes to provide “a richer response to the complex ethical challenges facing contemporary society” (Starratt, 1994).

Ethical Frameworks

• Ethic of Critique deals with questions of social justice and human dignity.

• Ethic of Justice implies more specific responses to unethical practices identified through the lens of critique. It is often connected with legal or codified procedures.

• Ethic of Care focuses on relationships from a personal rather than legalistic regard.

Ethical Frameworks

• Ethic of Community is “the moral responsibility to engage in communal processes as educators pursue the moral purposes of their work and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and work in schools” (Furman 2004).

Ethical Frameworks

• Ethic of the profession relates to justice, critique, and care posed by the other ethical paradigms but goes beyond these questions to inquire: What would the profession expect me to do? What does the community expect me to do? And what should I do based on the best interests of the students, who may be diverse in their composition and their needs?”(Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2011).

Ethical Frameworks

Ethic of Critique

Ethic of Justice

Ethic of CareEthic of Community

Ethic of Profession

Ethical Dilemmas

• Educational leaders are presented with ethical dilemmas that are at the least uncomfortable or worse and may be ethically ambiguous.

• “Each administrative decision carries with it a restructuring of human life: that is why administration at its heart is the resolution of moral dilemmas”( Foster, 1986) .

Method

• Narrative Inquiry – Clandinin and Connelly define narrative inquiry as

“trying to make sense of life as lived” (2000).

Autoethnography

• Autoethnography is a form of narrative study that is written and recorded by the individual who is the subject of the study (Cole & Knowles, 2001; Creswell, 2013; Ellis & Bochner, 2000).

• Autoethnography is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno) (Ellis, et al, 2011).”

Autoethnography

• Evocative Autoethnography– “Autoethnography is one of the approaches that

acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist” (Ellis, et al, 2011).

• Analytic Autoethnography– Anderson argues for a more analytic approach to

personal reflection (2006)

Methodological Progression

Qualitative Research

Narrative Inquiry

Personal History Narrative

Autoethnography

Narrative Cycles

My input

Their reaction

My responseTheir actions

Followup reflection: Did they improve?

Stimulus; e.g.,event(s)

initiating complaints or

concerns.

Data Collection

• Data sources and field texts– Notes – Memos– Agendas– Emails

Analytic memos and reflective journals

• As I read text documents related to each event, I recorded insights, memories, emotions, emergent themes, patterns, insights, and epiphanies in the development of my persona as a morally directed school leader.

• I maintained a daily journal in which I recorded other thoughts related to the process.

Vignettes

• “Auto-ethnographies show people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and what their struggles mean . . . Writing difficult stories is a gift to self, a reflexive attempt to construct meaning in our lives and heal or grow from our pain” (Ellis, 2007).

Five Extended Vignettes

• Organized in Phases stretched over one or more years.– Teachers Tom and Rita– Teacher Jon Strictor– Custodian Frieda Johns– Assistant Principal Janessa Alvarez

• Alternated between narration and reflection

Linear Model of Story Re-Creation

Story lived Story recorded through docs

Story modified through

reexaminationStory recreated

Believability and Verisimilitude

• “For autoethnographers, validity means that a work seeks verisimilitude; it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible, a feeling that what has been represented could be true” (Ellis, 2011).

Dangers of Personal Inquiry

• Clandinin and Connelly call for “wakefulness” on the part of the researcher, proceeding forward with a constant alert awareness of risks, of narcissism, of solipsism, and of simplistic plots, scenarios, and unidimensional characters” (2000).

Outside readers

• My readers helped reinforce key insights.

• Corrected some information.

• Contributed additional detail.

• Spoke to the verisimilitude of my descriptions and accounts.

My Moral Purpose

• I believe that my moral purpose has been to approach the position of school leadership with a combination of compassion and justice, in order to establish a collaborative and synergistic school community that works for the greater good of students. I believe that is the key learning of my study.

Implications for Further Study• Call for more autoethnographic studies, not

only by principals, but by other school leaders

• I see a particular need for studies that examine the ethics of justice and critique

Closure

“Our guiding principle in an inquiry is to focus on experience and to follow where it leads” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 188)

Closure

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Stanza 46,ll. 35-38