Social justice practice: A narrative inquiry perspective

Starting in experience

As narrative inquirers, we are deeply steeped in Dewey’s (1938) pragmatic philosophy, with his focus on temporality and continuity as central in how we understand experience as unfolding and enfolding over time. Dewey writes of ‘the value of consequences’ as leading ‘us to take the future into consideration’ (Dewey, 1981: 13). Rosiek (2013: 969) sharpens our thinking about the temporality of experience as he highlights pragmatic philosophy’s ‘inversion of the temporal frame of social inquiry’, noting the centrality of ‘the ontological status of the future possibilities as a guide for inquiry’ that recognizes

the way present experience is constituted in part by anticipations of the future […]. Experience is, for the pragmatist, the fabric of the myriad phenomenal qualities of living including our sense of identity, community, and anticipations of possible futures—all we ever have of a real world. (Rosiek, 2013: 696)

As narrative inquirers, we share Rosiek’s (2013) view that what we ‘use to judge the merits of ontological acts are the consequences—including their effects on our identity, affect, and most fundamental relations—that they precipitate in the ongoing stream of our experience’ (p. 697). This future consequential focus shapes the way we think; it shapes our understanding of what we have called living in the midst (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) and it shapes our understanding of an ‘expanded sense of responsibility in our activity of knowing’ (Rosiek, 2013: 700).

Narrative inquiry as a relational practice

In what follows, we draw on our conceptual understandings of a Deweyan-inspired view of experience to link narrative inquiry to pragmatism. As noted by Clandinin and Rosiek (2007), ‘experience is the fundamental ontological category from which all inquiry—narrative or otherwise—proceeds’ (p. 38). They note that Dewey’s understanding that experience is ‘inexpressible not because it is so remote and transcendent, but because it is so immediately engrossing’ (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007), and in this way, they turn attention toward an ‘aspect of pragmatism that makes it unique in the Western philosophical tradition as well as particularly germane to narrative inquiry’ (p. 39). Key in this understanding is that ‘Dewey’s ontology is not transcendental, it is transactional’, thereby shaping ‘epistemological implications’ which are ‘nothing short of revolutionary’ (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007: 39). Implied within this understanding is that the

regulative ideal for inquiry is not to generate an exclusively faithful representation of a reality independent of the knower. The regulative ideal for inquiry is to generate a new relation between a human being and her environment—her life, community, world—one that ‘makes possible a new way of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind of experienced objects, not more real than those which preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and oppressive’ (Dewey, 1981: 175) […] In this pragmatic view of knowledge, our representations arise from experience and must return to that experience for their validation. (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007: 39)

What Dewey’s pragmatic view of experience means for narrative inquirers is an emphasis upon staying attentive to ‘an individual’s experience in the world and, through the study’, there is a continuous seeking toward ‘ways of enriching and transforming that experience’ (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007: 42). Being alongside participants in a narrative inquiry ‘call[s] us to some form of action within the stream of experience’ (Rosiek, 2013: 695). Engaging in narrative inquiry alongside participants shifts the lives of both participants and researchers. While we note that no one leaves a narrative inquiry unchanged (Clandinin and Connelly, 1998), it is impossible to predict the ways that stories will be retold and relived. However, we do know that there will be effects ‘in the ongoing stream of our experience’ (Rosiek, 2013: 697), both in our experience as researchers and participants. As narrative inquirers, we are mindful of Dewey’s pragmatic argument that amelioration is never permanent or certain because the world is contingent and continually changing, never fixed in place (McKenna and Pratt, 2015).

We come to each narrative inquiry relationship, in the midst of the worlds of participants and researchers (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), knowing that our engagement with participants shapes our lives and the lives of participants. We are awake to these shifts as we live alongside participants as well as when we share these retold stories of experience in research texts. In both living alongside and in composing research texts, we become awake to the ways that lives are shifted and, sometimes, to how institutional narratives are shifted. It is through this knowing about shifting lives—of change—that we contemplate ways in which narrative inquiry constitutes a social justice practice. What is certain, then, is that there will be change as well as uncertainty and liminality embedded in the change. What, we ask, does our thinking narratively (Morris, 2002) with storied experience say about our obligations and responsibilities called forth in the relationships of which we are part? These questions about who we are in narrative inquiries are part of coming to understand narrative inquiry as a social justice practice.

Drawing forward a study

In what follows, we draw on a previously completed narrative inquiry (Clandinin et al., 2013) with the intention of showing how engaging in narrative inquiry is a social justice practice. The study, a narrative inquiry into the experiences of youth who left school prior to graduating, was shaped around research puzzles of understanding how leaving school early shaped the experiences of youth and how the experiences of youth shaped their leaving school early. We draw from Pam Steeves’ participation alongside one youth, Kevlar (pseudonym). In the study alongside each youth, we attended to who the youth and we were and were becoming, as well as to the changes in the relational space negotiated with each youth, both in the times we were with them and also as we imagined the future or consequent actions of each youth’s participation with us. We share fragments from the unfolding narrative account of Pam and Kevlar:

Wandering past closing storefronts inside the downtown mall on Thursday evening in late September, I arrived at the escalator to the deserted food court below. Empty chairs and tables filled the vast open basement floor, but where was Kevlar? My eyes scanned up and down the vacant space to get a first glimpse of the participant I would be alongside for the early school leavers’ study. My heart was pounding a little, perhaps he would not be there, but then I saw him at the credit card kiosk where he had stood since mid-afternoon that day, trying to make sales. I was delighted to meet him, a nice young man. We chit chatted for a minute. He was bored and hungry, he said. Then I waited a short distance away until his official job time ended. Kevlar thought he should stick it out even though I realized there was no one around to check on him.

Kevlar was personable and talkative. He wanted to be part of the study. He noticed it on an Internet website he came across and he made contact by email. Kevlar thought we would be interested in his story of leaving school early because it might be quite different than most. For him it wasn’t about school but about his ‘screwed up’ upbringing. (Steeves, 2013: 129)

In the account that follows from this introduction, Pam weaves Kevlar’s stories of his life; stories that include being taken from his mother at his birth by his father and grandmother, of his dad’s accident, of extended trips to his grandmother’s home, and of happy times in his early years of school. Using Kevlar’s words, Pam then moves forward to the years when he and his father lived in a motel in an area known as ‘inner city’ even though it was not located in the ‘downtown’. The text that follows is written as a found poem, in which words from transcripts are composed in ways that are evocative and reflect an artful representation of the experiences:

I went to Easton for Elementary

It was really difficult going to school

I couldn’t really tell anyone where I lived

I’d come home and play on the computer

Yeah. I grew up on the computer

I didn’t really fit into anything

Like fit in with the popular kids or anything

But that’s school (Steeves, 2013: 131)

Kevlar tells his story noting that he was the

most unpopular kid in school

Completely alone, definitely embarrassing

Cause in schools

There’s always the people

Who have the perfect lives, the perfect parents

And they rocket directly to the top

They’re practically favoured by all the teachers

Because they get the best grades,

Because they’re not even stressed at all

School is built for them

And it just doesn’t work out well for anyone that’s not in a perfect situation. (Steeves, 2013: 131–132)

Kevlar described multiple moves and multiple schools. He sometimes experienced his schools as ‘cool’ and some classes such as ‘home economics, cooking’ (Steeves, 2013: 133) as fun. However, as he moved around with his mother and siblings, he found school more and more challenging:

I finished Grade 9 at Valleycrest

I just barely passed

They can’t actually fail you in Grade 9. (Steeves, 2013: 133)

By the end of Grade 9, Kevlar described his life as a life in pieces. There was an altercation with his Mom in which he was chased down the hall and out into the street:

She starts chasing me, so I go out to the end of the hall

She closes the door and locks it.

I walked outside and tried to yell to her from the window

I’m not even wearing shoes

No shoes, no socks, nothing. (Steeves, 2013: 134)

In the narrative account, Pam notes that, at one point, Kevlar stopped the conversation to ask whether the audio recorder was still on. Pam assured him that it was and he went on, assured that his story was recorded:

And from there I walked,

To Rivenmore Mall

The only place I knew,

Knew anyone would be

Seeing my friend Kenzie

Went back to her house

Her mom called social services

I gave them my Mom’s phone number so they could talk to her

She told them she would let me back in

But she told me to f…off.

She doesn’t let me back in. (Steeves, 2013: 134–135)

Kevlar described a series of group homes, homes that he frequently left without permission in order to see his friends. As he said, ‘it created a kind of chain, of going from group home to group home’ (Steeves, 2013: 135):

During this time I started Grade 10 at George Wood

And I kept trying to do it as much as I could

Living in random places

But it’s really hard to do school when you don’t live anywhere.

I could do the school …

It’s just like after school.

I would have to do my homework

Figure out where I’m going to stay

Figure out if I’m going to make it through the day.

A lot of the time I ended up just going to the mall

Staying all night

Cause it’s open

24 hours

I ended up completely going the homeless route. (Steeves, 2013: 136)

Kevlar then described some shifts, of going to a group home and staying, and of then moving back in with his Mom in Grade 11. While his home and school life improved for his Grade 11 year, a family fight occurred with the result that his mother left and he and his sister continued to live in the home for a while with a series of roommates. Kevlar eventually said,

And I left school

And … It really sucked

Cause that was probably my favourite school

And in Alberta it’s almost impossible for a kid to get a 4^th year at a public school

So I just had to stop school. (Steeves, 2013: 138–139)

Pam describes how Kevlar said he needed US$70 for registration for online courses. As she listened, Pam was becoming more and more drawn into Kevlar’s story:

I was startled wide awake to realize Kevlar had been able to stay in school so long, making it to mid-way through the first semester of Grade 12. He told me, ‘It sucked changing so much but my mind’s built that way now I guess’. He added, ‘I’ve always known that education is the key to life and I think it’s ridiculous to not get it’. (Steeves, 2013: 140)

As Pam shifted into Kevlar’s stories after he left school, he talked of going to a design arts/computer school. When Pam and Kevlar met for a final time to negotiate the narrative account, Kevlar spoke of how ‘it was good to see his story of leaving school on paper, reflecting on it with someone is different than reflecting on it yourself’ (Steeves, 2013: 144). He felt it gave him perspective, and he now wondered about a number of things, for example, what it was like for his younger sister and brother after he had been kicked out. He mentioned that he liked some of the names Pam gave to parts of his account, one of these was a section Pam named ‘Fortune Cookie’. And he said to her ‘Maybe we should call this (the whole piece) “Fortune Cookie”’ (Steeves, 2013: 144). Pam liked how he used the word ‘we’. It made her think about his understanding of the co-authoring going on at this moment in the narrative inquiry. He wondered whether Pam could do the same kind of thing (a narrative inquiry) with his younger sister. Then months later, Pam heard from Kevlar who had found her email address and had written to her to let her know he had a job and an apartment. He wanted her to know because he knew she cared about him.

Returning to experience

In our work as narrative inquirers, our starting points for research emerge from our lives and the lives of participants, rather than in practices or policies that have created a problem that needs to be inquired into by researchers. We did not begin with concerns around early school leaving that are ‘often focused on the multiple costs of early school leaving and its complex social and health consequences’ (Clandinin et al., 2013: 1). Rather, we began with meeting Kevlar and Pam, in their experiences that came together as they met, in ways that allowed them to travel to each other’s worlds (Lugones, 1987).

Had we begun the study in the multiple costs of early school leaving, our research would extend from, and add to, predetermined constructions of ‘problems’ that marginalized groups may often face and constitute. In naming these ‘social justice problems’, and framing consequent research questions into particular ‘social justice issues’, participants and people more broadly can become at risk of having their experiences, their stories, written about, and for them, written over or, perhaps, squeezed to fit into the predetermined issue or problem. Lives, and the complex and continuous composing of lives, might also become invisible. The policies and practices that extend from such research might miss the very issues or problems they were intended to address or resolve. We do not intend to argue that social justice research should not be undertaken. It is not that social justice proponents or researchers in education are consciously constructing children and youth, families, or other educators as problems, but rather that the problem itself (whatever that may be) becomes the central focus of inquiry, effectively displacing multiple facets of experience.

What we, as narrative inquirers, are arguing is that we are concerned when we begin research with policies and practices rather than with a focus on the lives of people. We are also trying to show that identifying problems without attending to lives first can result in silencing the experiences of participants. We do not see Kevlar as a representation of a social justice problem but as a person in the midst of composing a life. Engaging in narrative inquiry offers us possibilities for engaging in social justice practices that are attentive to lives first, with a knowledge that change, however uncertain, does occur.

As long as people remain constructed as problems, and are known first and foremost in relation to the issues or problems they face, social justice practice will be difficult to achieve. We wonder about what would have happened if we had begun with seeing Kevlar as one of a group of people who are a social problem rather than a person composing a life. What, we wonder, would it mean in terms of sustaining agency and authorship for both participant and researcher as they compose their lives through narrow scripts written for them that may be imposed on them by seeing them first as a manifestation of a social problem in need of a solution.

We wonder how beginning with a framing of a life as a problem would mean for another important aim of social justice practice, that is, capacity building for individual and community well-being. Would that aim be obscured? This shift in starting point, from understanding lives in relation, lives unfolding over time and place, necessitates a shift in thinking, a shift in which, at least in part, we are called upon to imagine differently, to imagine otherwise. As we live in this way, that is, in ways in which it is possible to retell and to imagine reliving storied experience, we resonate with Rosiek’s (2013: 695–696) sense that this ‘transformation through ongoing inquiry’, this potential for ‘transformation of present and future possibilities for experience’, is not a simplistic endeavor. Indeed,

This emphasis on the ontological status of the future possibilities as a guide for inquiry is not a simplistic futurism, likely to degrade into a game of competing predictions or advocacy for utopian goals unmoored in present constraints. It instead involves recognition of the way present experience is constituted in part by anticipations of the future. (Rosiek, 2013: 696)

Thinking narratively as a social justice practice: a relational practice

In turning again to the narrative account with Pam and Kevlar, we read that Kevlar is awakened to who he is and who he is becoming as he notes that his experience of telling his story in words and drawings to Pam helps him see that ‘tiny little moments … changed the rest of my life’ (Steeves, 2013: 144). He wondered how his grandma would describe her taking him away at the hospital when he was born—that she might now see the whole thing differently. He wondered whether his mom would ever realize what had happened. Months after Pam and Kevlar last met, Kevlar contacted Pam to let her know of his ‘good news’ (Steeves, 2013: 210), a job and a home place. And he told Pam, ‘I’m sure you of all people would appreciate it’. It is the consequent actions of participants and researchers that inform understandings of the change in the living and telling of lives. For Kevlar, the possibility of living otherwise is informed by his wonders and actions and perhaps the narrative inquiry of which he was a part.

As we wonder about our obligations and responsibilities called forth in the relationships of which we are a part, both in the present living of a narrative inquiry and long into the future, we realize how different this question is from those commonly asked in research, that is, questions which position researchers as seeking to understand the ‘other’. We return to Kevlar and Pam’s relationship as we think about our obligations and responsibilities as narrative inquirers, obligations and responsibilities in which thinking narratively makes visible ways in which narrative inquiry is a continuous endeavor toward social justice. We turn now not to Kevlar’s experience, but to Pam’s experience. She too was in the midst as she came alongside Kevlar.

Long before Pam first met Kevlar in the empty basement food court of the downtown mall, she was thinking narratively with the experiences she carried of schools, schooling, and places outside of schools. As noted by Clandinin (2013: 191), narrative inquiries always ‘begin with an autobiographical inquiry into who the researcher is in relation to the phenomenon under study, which helps to set the personal, practical, and theoretical/social justifications and shapes the emerging research puzzle’. What became visible for Pam as she prepared for the inquiry alongside youth who left school early was her remembering of her own childhood experiences as allowing for the imaginative ‘trying on’ of different identities through playing with her sister as she moved from place to place. She also inquired into her experiences alongside Matthew, her son, who was seen as a problem, as deficit, as someone who needed to be fixed, had ‘scripts composed for him’, which ‘followed him relentlessly’ (Clandinin et al., 2013: 11). These scripts

were always interfering; records saying what he couldn’t do. No records followed me. No visible difference caught me out. I was never slotted, never defined, but rather free to imagine and re-imagine who I was and was becoming.

As Pam shows in the narrative account, Kevlar’s sharing of his storied life shaped ongoing retellings in her life, retellings for example in relation to her notions of family as she learned of ‘situations and circumstances that parents could be in that would be untenable for a young and growing child’ (Steeves, 2013: 141). Pam awakened, as she traveled with Kevlar ‘to a world so different from my own when I grew up’ (Steeves, 2013: 140). Like Kevlar and his wonders after reading the written narrative account with Pam, she too was continuing to become, continuing to see the world in new ways. As Pam inquired into Kevlar’s life experiences, she experienced a deep understanding of what it means to come alongside youth whose lives, like all lives, are always in the making, forever on the way. She attended more profoundly to the multiple scripts at play in lives, labeling, defining and possibly holding us as prisoners to our own autobiographies. The scripts that followed Matthew defined the parameters of his life, creating limitations for him and his mother Pam. The stories she learned to hear as she listened to Kevlar shifted Pam’s sense of the significance of being in relation with Kevlar. Pam realized the relationship offered the opportunity for a deeper noticing, a deeper reflection but also a resistance to scripts assigned within institutional and cultural narratives. As she came alongside Kevlar, her imagination was ignited. Spending sustained time with Kevlar shaping a space where it was possible to name bumping places (Clandinin et al., 2013), to resist but also to become, emboldened Pam to see the possibilities for researchers who attend to participants over time.

We return to Dewey’s notions of pragmatism linking these to narrative inquiry as a practice in social justice:

The doctrine of the value of consequences leads us to take the future into consideration. And this taking into consideration of the future takes us to the conception of a universe whose evolution is not finished, or a universe which is still, in James’ term ‘in the making’, ‘in the process of becoming’, of a universe up to a certain point still plastic…This consideration confirms the human and moral importance of thought and of it’s reflective operation in experience. (Dewey, 1981 [1931], as cited in Rosiek, 2012: 12)

As shown through the fragments shared of Pam’s narrative account with Kevlar, both participant and researcher are in the process of becoming. The transactional research methodology called for by Dewey is enacted in narrative inquiry, and in so doing, narrative inquiry can be situated as a practice in social justice.

Necessarily troubling social justice

Thinking with Pam and Kevlar’s experience, we turn back to the questions we asked earlier. Questions, common in social justice research that come with expectations that we can clearly name the social justice issues at the outset of the study, that the experiences in relation to social justice are predictable, or perhaps speak to particular policies or programs. Yet, in Pam’s and Kevlar’s experience, we come to see that by thinking with experience, this sense of expectation and predictability is impossible. Instead, we recognize, like Brockmeier (2009), that the human potential to act, choose, and imagine is integral to the human condition. Here, imagination extends a sense of agency that is important; yet, we can only understand this agency in the context of a life in the making. In narrative inquiry, we start with experience and with an understanding of life as always in the midst. Pam and Kevlar’s narrative inquiry relationship reflects life in the making, and creates the possibility to ‘break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness’ (Dewey, 1985, as cited in Colapietro, 2011).

It seems to us that there is a paradox, that when social justice concerns are predetermined, people can be denied voice. What stands out in these situations is that there is a singular focus upon the present, in which past and future seem irrelevant or at least not part of current concerns. This is difficult for us to accept since, as noted by Rosiek (2013: 693), Dewey helps us understand that the significance of our research is located ‘in the horizon of possible consequences that might follow from our inquiries’. He draws further on Dewey (Dewey, 1981 as cited in Rosiek, 2013), who noted,

Pragmatism, thus, presents itself as an extension of historical empiricism, but with this fundamental difference, that it does not insist upon antecedent phenomena but upon consequent phenomena; not upon the precedents but upon the possibilities of action. And this change in point of view is almost revolutionary in its consequences. An empiricism which is content with repeating facts already past has no place for possibility. (p. 696)

As noted earlier, a significant methodological contribution of a pragmatist philosophy is the understanding that our inquiry practices are deeply linked to future possibilities (Rosiek, 2013), which, given the focus in narrative inquiry on living, telling, retelling, and reliving experience, situates narrative inquiry as a social justice practice. For Kevlar, this was significant, as he began to see and tell stories of a life in which he had never left school, where school deeply mattered and where he composed his identity as someone despite the stories written for him. Pam remembers the times they sat together surrounded by scraps of paper and fortune cookie wrappers, and how she had to find new possibilities of telling and retelling who she had been, and is becoming, as a teacher and a mother.

It has been in living alongside participants in narrative inquiries that we came to know social justice concerns, concerns which are often not easily named particularly when, in order to be named, the complex unfolding of lives, of who participants and we each are and who we are each becoming, needs to fit within dominant narratives. Much seems to be ‘at risk’ if this need to fit within dominant narratives is the only possibility. Rosiek (2013) located ‘pragmatism in a tradition of radical ontological theorizing and political action’ (p. 692). Here, our work can then make significant contributions to practices and policies, but not in a way that is predetermined. To adopt a social justice lens in advance of an inquiry with participants is, for us, a preconception that can cover over experience. For a narrative inquirer, it is the relationship that becomes the context in which issues of social justice or injustice arise and can be inquired into; it is also within the relationships that we can live in ways that reflect socially just practices.

Imagining forward

Pam stayed present in Kevlar’s life. Living a commitment to those who are in our research also means that we listen carefully for the social justice issues that are named during and as part of the inquiry—issues that are named within a relational context and in ways that consider the values of consequences and the generation of possible future experiences. This way of thinking also shifts away from a descriptive account of experience, to recognizing the ‘esthetic, pedagogical, and performative aspects’ (Rosiek, 2013: 699) of experience. In this way, we show how social justice issues are lived, understood, and told by participants and researchers; there are multiple visions and ideas of social justice. For us, as narrative inquirers, these are grounded in experience.

As we dare in narrative inquiry to listen and to think narratively with stories (Morris, 2002), which have no end, we begin at the same time to join together, allowing for movement away from dominant narratives and toward openings to imagine otherwise consequent actions. Perhaps Kevlar’s notion that Pam would care is his response to imagining a consequent action for Pam. The wonderment, curiosity, and surprise that come through this movement enlarge participants’ and our awareness of the present but also awareness of future possibilities to engage with and form the communities in which we live. In these ways, the landscape continues to move and is shaped in ways that call forth a more socially just world.