Whose Meaning is This?: Navigating the Narrative Inquiry Story World

This paper draws from a recent dissertation focused on 1) how two beginning English teachers made meaning from classroom events and 2) how I, the researcher, made meaning from research events. Through interviews, conversations, participants’ writings, classroom observations, and field notes, I collected the stories participants lived and told during their university coursework, full-time internship, and second-year teaching experiences (2008-2011). Six phases of data analysis provided a way to consider the connections between participants’ and researcher’s meaning-making processes; however, whose meaning is represented in the final text? This paper illustrates how Langer’s (2011) framework for building literary understanding lent five critical stances from which I read research experiences as texts and composed a research “story world.” A discussion on this approach to representation in narrative inquiry speaks to the suitability of narrative inquiry for understanding and communicating the complexity of researching lived experiences