"Situating Narrative Inquiry"made a little more sense to me than "What Do Narrative Inquirers Do?". As I was reading this piece flashbacks of last semester started popping into my head. I took Communication Theory and we discussed qualitative and quantitative research, as well as narrative inquiry. In this piece the author tells us what narrative inquiry is on page four, "What narrative researchers hold in common is the study of stories or narratives or descriptions of a series of events." The rest of the piece discusses in detail the four turns in narrative inquiry. Before discussing each they sum up the four and tells why they use the term 'turn' on page seven, "We use the term turn strategically because we want to emphasize the movement from one way of thinking to another and highlight the fact that such changes can occur rapidly or slowly, depending on the experience of the researchers and their experiences when doing research." As they go into detail about relationships of researcher and researched, from the general to the particular, and the blurring knowing I can't help but think that from numbers to words as data is the most important. On page fifteen the say, "The turn from numbers to words as data is not a general rejection of numbers but a recognition that in translating experience to numeric codes researchers lose the nuances of experience and relationship in a particular setting that are of interest to those examining human experience." In other words, numbers don't capture the emotional aspect of a narrative.
In the second piece, "What Do Narrative Inquirers Do?", stories were told as examples of narrative inquiry. The first story is about Ming Fang He, "Ming Fang He is a mainland Chinese woman who went through the cultural revolution as a young girl, spent time on a reforming farm, received her bachelor's degree in China and her master's degrees in English and in linguistics at two different universities in Canada." This story was interesting, but I didn't relate to it as much as I did the second one. The second story is about a group of five people, "They are a part of an ongoing research group--teachers, principals, and teacher educators--who are trying to understand their places on the professional knowledge landscapes on which they live." As a future teacher I relate to their struggles and having converstations with other future teachers about students. The author gives the reason why they used this story as an example, "Our purpose in giving this example is to demonstrate the use of terms that structure our three-dimensional narrative inquiry space."
In the second piece, "What Do Narrative Inquirers Do?", stories were told as examples of narrative inquiry. The first story is about Ming Fang He, "Ming Fang He is a mainland Chinese woman who went through the cultural revolution as a young girl, spent time on a reforming farm, received her bachelor's degree in China and her master's degrees in English and in linguistics at two different universities in Canada." This story was interesting, but I didn't relate to it as much as I did the second one. The second story is about a group of five people, "They are a part of an ongoing research group--teachers, principals, and teacher educators--who are trying to understand their places on the professional knowledge landscapes on which they live." As a future teacher I relate to their struggles and having converstations with other future teachers about students. The author gives the reason why they used this story as an example, "Our purpose in giving this example is to demonstrate the use of terms that structure our three-dimensional narrative inquiry space."