Narrative Inquiry (NI) and Appropriate Methodology (AppM) by Richard Fay

Richard writes: As many of you know, as prompted by a seminar by Adrian Holliday (based on his 1992 article) and sessions by former colleague Mike Beaumont, the major revelation from my own MA studies (back in the day) concerned appropriate methodology for TESOL, a very current issue then (before Holliday’s seminal publication on this theme was published in 1994) especially as the proselytising push towards Communicative Language Teaching (supported by private sector EFL native-speaker driven ELT) was then increasingly perceived to be crashing into the needs and expectations and cultures of public sector, local teacher-driven ELT around the world. This theme had great explanatory power for my own experiences as a recently trained (CertTEFLA) teacher naively implementing my CLT training in the university ELT sector in 1980s Poland.

That encounter with AppM (for TESOL) influenced me greatly, and I have been intrigued by the possibilities of extending it to other areas of practice ever since. Thus, my doctoral study (Fay, 2004) explored the development of distance learning in Greece through a Holliday-ean AppM frame of reference. Also in Greece I considered the language teacher education curricula for Greek teachers of English, French and German using an AppM frame (Fay and Hill, 2003; Fay, Hill and Davcheva, 2006; Fay, Spinthourakis & Anastassiadi, 2000). More recently, with Ros Hawley and Ellie Sherwood, I have begun applying a similar frame to my klezmer ensemble teaching, i.e. appropriate world music ensemble methodology, or in Music Education terms, appropriate Performing Ethnomusicology methodology. And a couple of years back, at a Greek Applied Linguistics event, I also tried applying it to CLIL (content and language integrated learning) (Fay, 2012). Finally, last month, with Parneet, we presented AppM to a cohort of Ross White’s MSc Global Mental Health students at Glasgow University and suggested it might be a useful frame in more therapeutic areas, an idea supported by recent thinking in cross-cultural counselling for example (Gerstein et al, 2011).

Today, a new volume edited by Sheila Trahar (2013) has made me think about AppM and another important area of my work, i.e. Narrative Inquiry (NI). In this work, Trahar and colleagues foreground “the importance of the context in which research takes place and critiques the dominant discourses that inform narrative inquiry so that they are not applied unquestioningly, particularly in contexts that do not privilege these discourses” (1993: back cover).

They argue that “… all researchers should develop methodological approaches that are grounded in local contexts and that pay attention to how knowledge is shared and understood in those contexts” (ibid).

As with Holliday-ean thinking about AppM, there is both a micro concern for particular practice as well as a concern for the macro ideological landscape – the need for, and imperative therefore placed on all (NI) researchers to address, contextually appropriate methodology “becomes even more important when those local contexts have historically been subjugated through colonialism and when local, indigenous ways of knowing have been ignored or dismissed as worthless” (ibid).

References
Fay, R. (2004). Stories of emergent cultures of distance learning and collaboration: Understanding the CELSE-Hellenic Open University Project (unpublished doctoral thesis). The University of Manchester.

Fay, R. (2012). “Appropriate methodology revisited at a time of cross-curricular approaches to language education”

Fay, R. and Hill, M. (2003). Educating language teachers through distance learning: the need for culturally-appropriate DL methodology, Open Learning, 18(1): 9-27.

Fay, R., Hill, M. and Davcheva, L. (2006). The need for culturally-appropriate distance learning methodology in crosscultural development contexts. In Lionarakis, A. (ed.), Open and Distance Education – Elements of Theory and Practice [translated from Greek]. (pp.151-173). Propobos: Athens.

Fay, R., Spinthourakis, J.-A. and Anastassiadi, M.-C. (2000). Teacher education for teachers of English and French: Developing parallel distance learning programmes in Greece. In M. Beaumont and T. O’Brien (eds.), Collaborative research in second language education. (pp.109-122). Stoke: Trentham Books.

Gerstein, L.H., Heppner, P.P., Ægisdottir, S., Leung, S-M.A. and Norsworthy, K.L. (2012). Essentials of cross-cultural counseling. London: Sage.

Holliday, A.R. (1992). Tissue rejection and informal orders in ELT projects: collecting the right information. Applied Linguistics, 13(4), 403-424.

Holliday, A.R. (1994). Appropriate methodology and social context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trahar, S. (ed.) (2013). Contextualising narrative inquiry: developing methodological approaches for local contexts. London: Routledge.