The Story So Far

He continues:

Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual's search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual's life is a part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life. Once again the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions. (pp. 206-7)

In many ways Middleton (1992) summarises the aspirations when she says:

Teachers, as well as their students, should analyse the relationship between their individual biographies, historical events, and the constraints imposed on their personal choices by broader power relations, such as those of class, race and gender. (p. 19)

In providing such intercontextual analysis, the different methodologies highlighted in this volume all provide important avenues. They all combine a concern with telling teachers' stories with an equal concern to provide a broader context for the location, understanding and grounding of those stories.

In awakening to history in our studies of teachers' stories, I have felt for some time that life history work is a most valuable avenue for collaborative, intercontextual work (Goodson, 1992). The distinction between life stories and life histories is an important one to restate. The life story is a personal reconstruction of experience, in this case by the teacher. 'Life story givers' provide data for the researcher often in loosely structured interviews. The researcher seeks to elicit the teacher's perceptions and stories but is generally rather passive rather than actively interrogative.

The life history also begins with the life story that the teacher tells but seeks to build on the information provided. Hence other people's accounts might be elicited, documentary evidence and a range of historical data amassed. The concern is to develop a wide intertextual and intercontextual mode of analysis. This provision of a wider range of data allows a contextual background to be constructed.

Crucial to the move to life history is a change in the nature of collaboration. The teacher becomes more than a teller of stories and becomes a more general investigator; the external researcher is more than a listener and elicitor of stories and is actively involved in textual and contextual construction. In terms of give and take, I would argue a more viable trading point can be established. This trading point, by focussing on stories in context, provides a new focus to develop our joint understandings of schooling. By providing this dialogue of a 'story of action within a theory of context' a new context is provided for collaboration. In the end, the teacher researcher can collaborate in investigating not only the stories of lives but the contexts of lives. Such collaboration should provide new understandings for all of us concerned with the world of schooling.

Personal Knowledge and Educational Research

As we have seen, story telling has been a sign in the media of a move away from cultural and political analysis. Why then might we assume that it would be any different in educational and social research. After all, educational research has tended to be behind mainstream cultural and political analysis in its cogency and vitality rather than ahead of it.

Let us go back a step. Storytelling came in because the modes of cultural and political analysis were biased, white, male and middle class. Other ways of knowing and representing grew at the periphery to challenge the biased centre. However, these oppositional discourses, having achieved some success in representing "silenced voices" have remained ensconced in the particular and the specific. They have, in short, not developed their own linkages to cultural, political analysis.

The assumption of so much postmodernist optimism is that by empowering new voices and discourses, by telling you stories in short, we will rewrite and reinscribe the old white male bourgeois rhetoric, so it may be. But, so what?

New stories do not of themselves analyse or address the structures of power. Is it not the commonsensical level, worthy of pause, to set the new stories and new voices against a sense of the centre's continuing power? The western version of high modernity is everywhere ascendant - we have an unparalleled "end of history triumphalism" with most of the historical challenges vanquished. Is this new ascendent authoritarian capital a likely vehicle for the empowerment of the silenced and the oppressed? This seems unlikely, particularly as capital has historically been the vehicle for the very construction and silencing of the same oppressed groups. Is it not more likely then that new discourses and voices that empower the periphery actually at one and the same time fortify, enhance and solidify the old centres of power. In short, are we not witnessing the old game of divide and rule?

The collection of stories then, especially the mainstream stories that live out a "prior script", will merely fortify patterns of domination. We shall need to move from life stories to life histories, from narratives to genealogies of context, towards a modality that embraces "Stories of action within theories of context". In so doing stories can be "located", seen as the social constructions they are, fully impregnated by their location within power structures and social milieux. Stories then provide a starting point for active collaboration, "a process of deconstructing the discursive practices through which one's subjectivity has been constituted (Middleton, 1992, p. 20)". Only if we deal with stories as the starting point for collaboration, as the beginning of a process of coming to know, will we come to understand their meaning; to see them as social constructions which allow us to locate and interrogate the social world in which they are embedded.