Tom Barone

A Return to the Gold Standard? Questioning the Future of Narrative Construction as Educational Research

Narrative construction is an approach to social research in which data are configured into any of a variety of diachronic, or storied, formats. Having recently gained popularity, this approach is now in danger of marginalization (along with other qualitative and quantitative forms of social research) as a result of politically charged attempts to reinstitute a narrow methodological orthodoxy. In an attempt to prompt discussion about the future of this inquiry approach, the author asks questions that highlight recurring issues within ongoing conversations among educational researchers who advocate and/or engage in the construction of narratives. These questions relate to the political character of stories, fictionalization, audience, modalities of representation, quality control, research purpose, and strategies for maintaining and enlarging the space for narrative construction as a qualitative research approach within an era of political retrogression.

Persuasive writings, vigilant readings, and reconstructed characters: the paradox of trust in educational storysharing

This paper addresses the issue of trust/mistrust in relation to the discourses of educational storytelling. Poststructuralists have highlighted the power relationships embedded within these kinds of discourse. Their recommended attitude is one of suspicion. But the author insists that, like discursive forms of critical science, story genres can sometimes achieve critical significance. That is, stories addressing educational phenomena can promote emancipatory moments within readers and thereby earn their trust. Examples of such moments in the life of the author‐as‐reader are provided. The author suggests that the integrity of such trustworthy stories be honored by publication in education journals.

A Narrative of Enhanced Professionalism Educational Researchers and Popular Storybooks About Schoolpeople

Three narratives about the history, current status, and future of educational researchers as professionals are discussed. The prevailing collective self-portrait portrays educational researchers as social scientists with maximum autonomy for setting their research agenda and for quality control of their products. A counternarrative of deprofessionalization posits limited autonomy: Research often follows available funding, and government-sponsored grants generally reflect a popularly held view of schools and schoolpeople as the sources of social ailments and undeserving of additional financial support. This view is implicitly reinforced as research findings based on this premise are disseminated to members of the general public through intermediaries, especially members of the press. A third narrative accepts the countercritique but, in a more hopeful vein, foresees educational researchers challenging this view of schoolpeople by speaking directly to the polity. This is accomplished through the creation of research texts in the form of accessible, compelling, morally responsible stories about the lives of schoolpeople, texts that are at once popular and excellent. In this manner is professionalism enhanced as educational researchers move to gain greater control over their research agenda by persuading members of the public and governmental funding agencies to increase support of research based on a more enlightened vision of schoolpeople as victims of difficult social conditions.

Chapter 5 The purposes of arts-based educational research

Abstract The author describes the confusion surrounding postmodern conceptions of social science, including the blurring of traditional distinctions between science and art. He argues that the disinction is an important one, for, as the two basic forms of human inquiry, science and art serve fundamentally distinct purposes. Unfortunately, only (social) scientific texts are considered useful by many educationists. The author attempts to clarify the basic purpose of value negation that is served by good arts-based research texts and argues for their legitimacy as a form of educational research.

Among the Chosen: A Collaborative Educational (Auto)biography

A central educational issue is the nature of the long-range influences of a teacher on a student. This article experiments with a narrative approach to exploring that issue. In collaboration with a young woman who is a former student of a high school teacher in North Carolina, the author shaped an (auto)biographical account of the subtle traces of this teachers impact on her life story. As a literary document, the storied text is designed less to provide conclusions than to elicit important methodological and substantive educational questions.

Challenging the educational imaginary: Issues of form, substance, and quality in film-based research

This article addresses issues of quality in film-based educational research projects. It recommends criteria related to aesthetic form and substance as appropriate for judging the usefulness of educational films in achieving one possible goal for film-based educational research. That goal is to effectively challenge the prevailing educational imaginary. This imaginary is described as a set of images of schools and school people, rooted in the larger culture, that supports a debilitating master narrative about education. Issues of quality and utility are explored within the context of one teacher-made film exhibited at (among other places) a film festival at the author’s college of education.

Comments on Coulter and Smith: Narrative Researchers as Witnesses of Injustice and Agents of Social Change?

In commenting on Coulter and Smith (2009), the author explores issues related to the place of the political in education research and in literature, but especially in forms of narrative research that possess both scientific and literary dimensions. More specifically, the author examines four sets of issues related to the researching and writing of forms of narrative composition that exhibit an overtly progressivist orientation. These issues involve (a) the fundamental purposes for which the research is undertaken, (b) the role of opposing tropisms operating through textual design elements that tend to promote or discourage multiple perspectives, (c) ethical issues related to assumed privileges of authorship by the researcher, and (d) the political prerogatives and responsibilities of readers of literary forms of narrative research in education.

Commonalities and Variegations: Notes on the Maturation of the Field of Narrative Research.

ABSTRACT The author of this essay comments upon the contents of the other articles in this issue of The Journal of Educational Research. He locates both similarities and differences within several dimensions of narrative research by the authors of these articles. These dimensions relate to: the definition(s) of narrative research, decisions about whose experiences are worthy of study by narrative researchers in the field of education, the manner in which narrative research may improve teaching and schooling, and the epistemological premises that support the purposes for engaging in narrative research. The author suggests that the differences-within-commonalities found in these articles reflect a healthy maturation of the field of narrative research.

On Equality, Visibility, and the Fine Arts Program in a Black Elementary School: An Example of Educational Criticism.

ABSTRACTBecause of the relative dearth of examples of educational criticism, proponents and critics of this controversial inquiry genre are often forced to speculate on its merits and demerits in the abstract, without benefit of particular referents. This article contains such an example and is presented as an invitation to a dialogue concerning the educative and miseducative potentials of educational criticism.The criticism emphasizes the portion of an elementary school arts program presided over by the arts and music specialists. Portraits of the activities show they largely avoid two hazards in teaching the arts to elementary black children: a monocultural curriculum that neglects the Black artistic heritages and a mechanicism that disconnects skill mastery from personal content. This portion of the arts program suggests a tentative solution to a central dilemma of the modern Black American experience by fostering tendencies toward both racial equality and individual visibility. The program made studen...

Thinking and Rethinking Elliot Eisner

The Perspectives section of this issue of Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy is devoted to the work and legacy of Professor Elliot Wayne Eisner. We, the guest editors—one former doctoral student of Eisner and two former doctoral students of Barone—can each trace our academic lineage back to him. Not surprisingly, therefore, this section has been largely designed to highlight and substantiate the profound effects of Eisner’s thinking, writing, and speaking on two fields of study to which he devoted his professional life—curriculum studies and arts education. To that end, we have asked over a dozen scholars who qualify in our judgment as “connoisseurs” of various dimensions of Eisner’s body of work in those fields, to share their own insights with the rest of us. But while this section might be viewed as consisting of a set of appreciative essays regarding Eisner’s apparently intended influences within those fields, the charge to our authors also left open possibilities for identifying and analyzing extensions of his thinking that Eisner himself might not have imagined, whether as influences on the work of our contributors themselves or the fields more broadly. Indeed, these outcomes may not merely have been unforeseen by Eisner; they may occasionally appear to a strict interpreter of Eisner’s work as odd or misguided, even as undesirable deviations from his stream of thought. But even each of the three of us students/editors have ourselves moved to re-channel, or at least embellish upon, Eisnerian notions: Barone’s emphasis throughout the years on the more overtly political in the practice of arts-based research; or within this volume, the reimagining by Richards (and Eisner’s former student Bruce Uhrmacher) of the connections between Eisner’s thinking and the field of cultural studies; and also herein, the departures by Burdick (and co-author Deb Freedman) from Eisnerian notions of the mind and imagination. These extensions, along with others, are offered in the spirit of Karl Jung’s famous quote to his own mentor, Sigmund Freud: “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 43). This Perspectives section is, indeed, partially about