Holding On Together

BT: Does it still retain the properties of the life history interview?

IG: No, not at all, because the crucial distinction to grasp for me, is the distinction between life story and life history. The life story, as I understand it, is the version of events that you render to me over time. Your partial, selective story. It is a story and we all have one... and we would tell different stories at different times in our life. The life history would seek to position and locate that story by bringing in other data, other insights, other theories, other questions which have not been raised in the initial rendition of the story... You would move from story to life history by, in my case, that crucial, intermediary, collaborative act which brings in other data and other questions to try and locate the quotes of the life story and.. render it a life history.

BT: OK. The way that you described it is as a collaborative enterprise, ultimately and ideally. What I've not got is any sense of it being an interactive enterprise. There's Ivor Goodson coming in and getting all this information from people... but Ivor Goodson is still the shadowy figure who is defined pure and simple by his status as a researcher... Why should I trust you? Why should anyone trust you? What are you going to give to us?

IG: I don't think I can answer that theoretically. You see, I think the question about who collaborates with whom and why they do it is... a deeply personal one. Often to do with eye contact, body language, chemistry, background, a million things which are quite impossible to legislate or predict so there is no answer in a vacuum to what you say. All that I can say is that some people at some times have trusted me, and I don't quite know why. I can certainly list a number of things that the shadowy researcher, as you described me, might bring to this trade, this collaborative action, which would be a whole range of different kinds of thoughts and insights about life stories over time and about school histories and curriculum histories...

BT: Is there any way that we, as researchers, can expedite the success with that relationship so that, for instance... the researcher would provide you with a research biography? Would you go along with that?

IG: Yes, I think I would. I mean, one of the things that I deeply believe in as part of the collaborative conversation that follows the initial kind of unmediated narration of the life story, is a lot of exchange around the life story, the researcher and the life story of the life story teller. So I would nearly always in my conversation, in that conversation, in the collaborative second stage, bring in quite a bit of information about my own biography.