"Every Word Is True": Stories of Our Experiences in a Qualitative Research Course

Experience happens narratively ... Therefore, educational experience should be studied narratively. (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 19) Narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience. It is a collaboration between researcher and participants over time-Simply stated.narrative inquiry is stories lived and told. (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 20) Narrative inquiry has only recently gained credibility as an alternative methodology and a valuable research approach (Angus, 1995; Clandinin & Connelly, 1986, 2000; Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998; Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007; Riessman, 2008; Webster & Mertova, 2007). Adhering to Riessman's (1993, 2008) understanding of narrative as stories that are topic specific, temporally ordered speech segments as opposed to broad general text, in this study I employed a narrative framework to uncover the perceived truths of eleven doctoral students and me, Dr. R, their professor, in an introductory qualitative research methods course. My Reasons for Conducting the Study I have taught qualitative methods for five semesters. Few of the students I teach in the course have prior knowledge about qualitative inquiry. Some come from disciplines characterized by a positivist orientation and during student introductions they invariably announce they are required to take the course. Early in the semester, others sometimes mention their concerns about their lack of academic writing skills, or their apprehensions about sharing a required end-of-semester PowerPoint presentation that frames a potential qualitative inquiry they might conduct for their dissertation. One or two students usually e-mail me, or talk with me privately about their difficulties critiquing assigned qualitative research articles. In some classes, a student may prefer to remain silent. On the other hand, every so often, some students may offer covert resistance by continually questioning weekly assignments. Yet, most appear motivated and enthused about acquiring a beginning foundation in qualitative research. They wholeheartedly participate in class discussions and collaborative group work. And, by the end of each semester students have bonded as a community of colleagues and researchers, and their evaluations of the course are always high. Recently it struck me that although my students shared some of their thoughts and feelings with me each semester, I had little insights into their individual and collective impressions of their experiences as they progressed week-by-week through the course. At most, I held vague assumptions about their subjective realities. In fact, I believed some students' affirmative course evaluations might connect to their delight about successfully completing Qualitative #1. I speculated students in positivist disciplines learned to enjoy the class and perhaps even found some information useful to their work. I thought students who felt inadequately prepared at the beginning of the semester probably overcame their fears and might even have discovered they were meant to be qualitative researchers. In the same way, I had a hunch students' confrontational behaviors were connected to their apprehensions about doing qualitative inquiry. I recognized I wanted to know more about these doctoral students from disciplines in nursing, second language acquisition, educational leadership, literacy, science, English, mathematics, technology, early childhood, and special education. I wondered how they perceived the course, described it, felt about it, judged it, remembered it, made sense of it, and talked about it with each other (Patton, 2002). I also wanted my students to become aware of their own learning and thought processes as they took part in an authentic inquiry. In addition, I sought to document my students' experiences over time in order to discover how I might improve my practices as the instructor of Qualitative Research Methods #1. …