Choreographing Intertextual Stories: Qualitative Inquiry Meets Oral History

Qualitative inquiry and oral history. When Janesick (2010) brought these two notions together in her book entitled Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story, she joined a tradition of some of the most innovative thinkers about the arrangement of narratives and the process of interpretation. Qualitative inquiry resists definition, but embraces description, and when choreographed can be simultaneously ordering and freeing. When applied to an oral history project the conditions are created for an artistic composition; a composition that allows room for improvisation and arrives at a plurality of meaning. Janesick expertly crafted a multidimensional space in this work within which deeper understandings come forth. She combines the introduction of new ideas with a strong and centered narration filled with instructive examples easily accessible by many different reading communities. Janesick (2010) brings her creation to life via the metaphor of choreography as she shares her dynamic understanding of oral history. Her version of oral history is clearly tied to serving a social justice agenda, and she is passionate about sharing her enthusiasm for the transformative qualities of oral history projects. When oral historians honor the transactions that occur between the "texts" that reside in people they enter the "dance" open to a choreography that elevates the opportunities for meaning-making within a particular context. In Janesick's view, the author/narrator/qualitative researcher/choreographer is the arranger of the "dance" (the multivocal story), and this choreographer is in a dialogic relationship with the participant/dancer; they together are in motion creating a version of the story. How does this transaction between two people actually operate within the context of an oral history project? Janesick's orientation to this question resides in a postmodern framing and resembles literary theorists' use of the concept of intertextuality. Reading intertextually (the shaping of meaning through the intentional symbiotic exchange of two or more "texts") has an important history and, in fact, represents (holds) a transformational moment in the history of literary theory (e.g., Bakhtin's (1981) notion of the "dialogic imagination" and Barthes' (1981) "plurality of meaning" and "five codes" of interpretation). Oral history interviewing (and in our case, the writing of a book review) intertextually is an extension of the concept. Janesick (2010) builds the bridge that makes this theoretical traversing possible. As the reviewers of Janesick's (2010) book, we benefitted from experimenting with the transactions that occurred between the "texts" that resided within us as we read and interpreted this work. We will follow Janesick's organizational structure for the book (centered around what she termed the critical elements in dance and choreography, namely order, design & tension, balance & composition, and harmony) to share some examples of the transactions we encountered as we experienced a co-reading of this work. Part I: Order: Reinventing Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher For us, this part of the book captured our attention by way of the power of the narratives selected as case examples. The reinvention Janesick (2010) points to centers on the potential that exists when a fuller complement of qualitative research tools and techniques are brought to bear on an oral history project. T: Janesick had me with her choice of an opening quote by Joan Didion, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." And then quite literally her Case 1.1 arrested my attention, "... my journey toward becoming an educator began the day I awoke to realize that I was trapped in a deathbed of my own making, hopeless, alone and just waiting to die. At 450 pounds I had become extremely depressed, lonely, and isolated" (p. 19). A: As I read the cases in the first chapter, I was first awestruck by the quality of the stories as they hooked my mind and imagination right away. …