Presenting my First Narrative Thinking

Hi everyone. Last week I had the opportunity to share some aspects of my research at the Narrative workshop. The workshop served as a platform for me to share my methodological thinking and receive constructive feedbacks from other doctoral students. Here are some highlights of my experience.

My presentation was divided into two parts: The first part consists of some theoretical and methodologies points from the literature. I decided to begin by introducing the definition of narrative, the element of narrative, types of narratives and how meaning is imposed on narratives. This knowledge would help beginners like me to understand briefly what is a narrative research. I also highlighted the works of prominent scholars of narrative research: such as; Mishler (1995), Reissman (1998). Apart from that, I summarised how narrative is positioned in the education field- in particular doctoral supervision. The second part of my presentation consists of the outline of my study- such as; my research aims and research questions; insights from the literature regarding doctoral supervision, theoretical perspectives; the data generation and data analysis methods.

To illustrate what my research topic is about and how I plan to conduct my research methods, I came up with a quick activity for the audience. In pairs, partners were instructed to complete tasks of story telling and re-storying. The reasons behind this activity are twofold: 1- to introduce how I intend to generate the narratives from a one-on-one narrative interview; 2- and how I am going to analyse the narratives by employing a narrative approach to data analysis.

I learned so much from this presentation. For instance, from the questions that I received, I realised that I still need to work on my theoretical perspectives. Perhaps in my next presentation, I would discuss initial findings from my pilot study as informed by the theoretical lens. Feedbacks that I received from the activity also provided me with some perspectives of possible challenges of narrative research. For example, some participants pointed out some challenges in listening to the stories narrated by their partners while others expressed challenges in representing and capturing the stories. In sum, I enjoyed doing my presentation and I learned a lot from the experience. Apart from gaining confidence in presenting my research thinking, I also received many valuable feedbacks that will help me improve my study. So, thank you for reading and wish me luck for my next presentation at the SEED PGR Conference 2015 🙂