Resonant work: towards an ethic of narrative research

Narrative inquirers, as do all engaged in research, assume a particular ontological and epistemological stance that underpins their work. Narrative inquirers in education frequently ground their work in an ontology of experience. While experience figures prominently in the history of philosophy and to a lesser extent in educational research, the view of experience that is foundational to narrative inquiry in a preponderance of extant educational research derives from the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. One of the central premises drawn from Dewey is that “experience is the fundamental ontological category from which all inquiry—narrative or otherwise—proceeds” (Clandinin and Rosiek 2007, p. 39). For narrative inquirers, experience is regarded as both the essence of being and the source of knowing. In other words, how and what we understand ourselves, and the world, to be are embedded and embodied in experience.