a narrative inquiry in physical education

A Narrative Inquiry into the negotiation of the dominant stories of physical education: Living, telling, re-telling, and re-living

Ashley Casey Loughborough University University of Limerick

Lee Schaefer University of Regina

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Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breadth and to it an indefinitely elastic extent. It stretches.

Dewey (1958, p. 4a).

“”“”The answer to the question, why narrative? Is, because experience.

Clandinin and Connelly (2000, p. 50).

Our inquiry is framed by Dewey’s (1938) pragmatic ontology and Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) narrative conception of experience as the living and telling, re-telling and re-living of stories of experience.

exploring the tension in my…

“”“”Clandinin and Connelly (1999).

Stories to live by

The tensions became explicit when my shifting stories to live by 'bumped against’ dominant narratives of physical education that shaped my professional knowledge landscape.

“”“”

Clandinin (2013),

While narrative research has moved in from the margins the words narrative and research together still seem to breed. resistance from those engaged in more dominant research paradigms.

“”“”

Clandinin (2013),

While this resistance takes on different feels in different contexts, it seems that often times the critiques point out the absence of rigor, the lack of theory, and the deficiency of generalizable findings.

“”“”

Like many narrative researchers, Dowling, Garrett, Hunter and Wrench (2013), take up these critiques and illustrate the plethora of narrative research that has taken place in, and added to, the knowledge base of physical education.

“”“”Clandinin (2013, p. 206).

We write to learn

and this writing allows us to think hard not only about how we negotiated the ‘bumping places’

but also how we might begin to prepare our pre service PETE teachers for the bumping that will no doubt ensue as their imagined stories of physical education bump with the grand narratives on the professional knowledge landscapes

Rossi, lisahunter, Christensen & Macdonald, (2015) Schaefer & Clandinin (2013).

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Clandinin and Connelly (2000) “”“”

We began our conversations by thinking about the notion of

‘living, telling, re-telling, and re-living’

Living: each of us live stories, and live in stories. While we live in our own personal stories, we also live in institutional stories, cultural stories and other stories that shift and shape how we live.

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1 2 3T H E O R I G I N A L D I A R I E S W E R E T H E L I V I N G

A N D T H E N A R R AT I V E S W E R E W R I T T E N F R O M T H I S P E R S P E C T I V E A N D T H E Y

R E P R E S E N T A L I T E R AT U R E O F P L A C E

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Telling: each of us tell stories. We tell stories about ourselves, and again we tell stories about the institutions within which we work and the cultures within which we live.

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B E F O R E T H E W R I T I N G O F T H I S PA P E R T H E Y W E R E

S H A R E D W I T H L E E A N D I N T H I S WAY I

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Environment Living Telling Retelling

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Re-Telling: while each of us live and tell stories we may not get the opportunity to re-tell our stories; to think deeply about the multiplicity of stories shaping our experiences, our ‘stories to live by’, and perhaps come to see our stories differently.

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“”“”We began our conversations by thinking about the notion of

I was an idiot or an idealist to try anything like this.

In thinking about sociality, the initial phase of the narrative fragment denotes a tension and self-doubt around the implementation of something outside of what the students expected in physical education.

From the fragment above we also denote a story of physical education being told by the students whom I was attempting to teach. While there is certainly an institutional story of physical education and a larger socio-cultural story of physical education, in staying with my lived experiences we see that the students also carry with them a story of what physical educations is, should be, and should not be.

“”“”

School is a place that these kids dislike being anyway, well some of them, but at least when I’m being bossy they understand their place and their role.

In conversations during our re-telling, we came to understand the being bossy, and the yelling as a part of the story of physical education that students expected.

Thinking temporally and moving back to our own experiences with physical education, we are reminded that the yelling and authoritative nature was also a part of the story of physical education we were involved in both as students ourselves and early on in our careers.

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Re-Telling


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“”“”Talk about a battle. Yet I get the feeling that

some of the battle was with themselves [personally] and themselves [as classes]. I wouldn’t say that it was a success as some lessons descended into a bit of a farce [while others were really quite good.

While at the time I may not have seen this ‘battle’ as a struggle for a story that made sense, through the re-telling process, and thinking temporally about the students’ experiences, we see that just as I bumped with the dominant stories of physical education, the students are bumping with a new story of physical education.

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“”“”This is certainly my project, as Adam [My

HOD] couldn’t give a shit. In investing nothing in the project, beyond his ‘trust’ in me, and making little or no effort to learn what I’m doing and why I think it’s important, then he places the responsibility squarely on me and my shoulders.

By unpacking this narrative and taking off my ‘rose-coloured spectacles’ when it came to doing ‘this’ we come to see that there is a counterstory being written (Lindeman Nelson, 1995).

Schaefer, Clandinin and Downey (2014) posited that dominant narratives can serve to silence or control particular groups by framing them as ‘less than’ or deficient.

It becomes easy at this point to think about me vs. Adam, and to position Adam as the physical education teacher in deficit, i.e. the one that needs fixing up. Yet as our re-telling unfolded we began to wonder about Adam’s stories.

Imagine Adam’s own isolation as a physical educator within a system that particularly devalues the epistemic status of physical education and greatly values the success of the sports teams he coaches.

We wonder about how difficult it must have been for Adam to be challenged by a new story of physical education. A story that from my perspective, and perhaps the broader research perspective, was a better way to engage students in physical education.


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Re-Living: This is the transactional nature of narrative inquiry. It is the notion that as we have the opportunity to think deeply about how our experiences are shaped by sociality, temporality and place.

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We see this process as interwoven with identity making and, as such, a rich contextual process that is imbued with individuals’ ‘stories to live by’ (Clandinin, 1995). We also see this process as a re-living and changing of stories.

“”“”If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives and possibly those lives around us.

(Okri 1997, p. 46 as cited in Clandinin, 2013, p. 22),

Designed byAshley Casey

I am a [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]?subject=

I can be found on twitter@DrAshCasey

Using hashtags like#pegeeks #pegeek #pechat #physed

thanks for listening

References Clandinin, D.J. (1995). Stories of possibility: Living on the landscape with children. Early Childhood Education, 28 (2), 4-8. Clandinin, D.J. (2013). Engaging in narrative inquiry. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (1995). Teachers' professional knowledge landscapes. New York: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (1999). Storying and restorying ourselves: Narrative and reflection. In A. Y. Chen & J. Van Maanen (Eds.), The reflective spin: Case studies of teachers in higher education transforming action (pp. 15-23). Singapore: World Scientific. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). Narrative Inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D.J., Schaefer, L., & Downey, A. (2014). Narrative conceptions of knowledge: Towards understanding teacher attrition. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. Dewey, J. (1958). Nature and experience. New York: Dover Enright, E. & O'Sullivan, M. (2012). Physical Education “in All Sorts of Corners”, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 83:2, 255-267, DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2012.10599856

References Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education the arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Lindeman-Nelson, H. (1995). Resistance and insubordination. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 10(2), 23–40. Rossi, T., lisahunter, Christensen, E. & Macdonald, D. (2015). Workplace learning in Physical Education: Emerging teachers’ stories from the staffroom and beyond. London: Routledge. Schaefer, L. & Clandinin, D. J. (2011) Stories of sustaining: A narrative inquiry into the experiences of two beginning teachers. Learning Landscapes, 4 (2), 275-295.

NB: All images were purchased and downloaded from iStockphoto