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In search of a theoretical basis for
storytelling in education research:
story as method
Kathleen Marie Gallagher
a
a
Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning (CTL), Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education , University of Toronto , 252
Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1V6, Canada
Published online: 20 Apr 2011.
To cite this article: Kathleen Marie Gallagher (2011) In search of a theoretical basis for storytelling
in education research: story as method, International Journal of Research & Method in Education,
34:1, 49-61, DOI: 10.1080/1743727X.2011.552308
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2011.552308
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International Journal of Research & Method in Education
Vol. 34, No. 1, April 2011, 4961
ISSN 1743-727X print/ISSN 1743-7288 online
2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/1743727X.2011.552308
http://www.informaworld.com
In search of a theoretical basis for storytelling in education
research: story as method
Kathleen Marie Gallagher*
Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning (CTL), Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada
Taylor and Francis CWSE_A_552308.sgm 10.1080/1743727X.2011.552308
(Received 24 February 2010; final version received 28 June 2010)
International Journal of Research and Method in Education 1743-727X (print)/1743-7288 (online) Original Article 2011 Taylor & Francis 34 1000000April 2011 KathleenGallagher kgallagher@oise.utoronto.ca
In this article, the author argues that storytelling is centrally important to education
research. The proliferation of narrative methodologies, albeit significant and
innovative in the evolution of qualitative studies in education, has, nonetheless, not
been accompanied by a theoretical body that has captured the complexities
ethical and methodological inherent in such work. Despite a presumed
emancipatory inclination, one might reasonably argue that storytelling in education
research has frequently produced reactionary and imperialistic accounts. Turning
to some of the works of Hannah Arendt and Bertold Brecht, two theorists of great
storytelling capability, the author considers how their methodological thinking
might be productively imported. Finally, the author draws some lines between
these methodological innovators and the kind of empirical research that would
most clearly profit from their more politicized and theoretically engaged
considerations of the art of storytelling.
Keywords: ethnography; qualitative methods; narrative
In this article, I argue that storytelling is centrally important to education research.
It would, however, not be an over-exaggeration to say that storytelling in educa-
tion research has remained largely under-theorized. The proliferation of narrative
methodologies, however significant and innovative in the evolution of qualitative
studies in education, has not been accompanied by a theoretical body that has
captured the complexities ethical and methodological inherent in such work.
Education has always used the power of the I to break open questions posed by
social and cultural theory. Despite this presumed emancipatory inclination, one
might reasonably argue that storytelling in education research has frequently
produced reactionary and imperialistic accounts (see Fine et al. 2000; Vidich and
Lyman 2000; Gallagher 2008). To support a hunch that certain kinds of theoriza-
tions hold out the possibility of significantly expanding and rendering more
complex ones often nave notions of storytelling in the field of education, I turned
to some of the works of Hannah Arendt and Bertold Brecht,
1
two theorists of
great storytelling capability, to see what might be imported as method for my own
research in education. Finally, then, I urge a move from story as case to story as
method as I draw some lines between these theoretical architects, their methodol-
ogies of storytelling, and the kind of empirical research that most clearly profits
*Email: kgallagher@oise.utoronto.ca
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50 K.M. Gallagher
from their more politicized and theoretically rigorous considerations of the art of
storytelling.
From much of her writing, it is clear that Hannah Arendt understood that all
abstract theories began as particular experiences. In the human sciences, most
contemporary social theorists would likewise challenge claims to abstract universal
validity in the human sciences seeing, instead, the notion of objectivity in research as
a rhetorical device. Objectivity, as the marker of claims of validity and sound
abstraction, therefore, remains at the heart of the trouble storytelling encounters in
education research. In her Lectures on Kants political philosophy, Arendt describes
storytelling as the way one trains the imagination to go visiting, arguing that it is
neither a vehicle for authentic critical voice, as some humanists might argue, nor a
means by which one can postpone the authoritative moment necessary to criticism
and action (1982, 43). In this understanding, Arendt carefully responds to the
contestedness of storytelling among contemporary critical theorists. If stories are
dangerously subjective, impartiality, as its presumed opposite Arendt would argue, is
not the result of some higher standpoint that would then settle [a] dispute by being
higher than the mele [but] is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others into
account (42). While this may not seem particularly radical to the post-positivists of
today who continue to critique the dream of impartiality as an assurance of objective
science, in practice, few social scientists have as successfully used storytelling as
methodology in the illuminating and radically subjective ways apparent in Hannah
Arendts work.
So methodologically sound and critically engaged is storytelling for Arendt that it
became the primary route to critical understanding in her writings on totalitarianism.
Because she argued that totalitarianism was as much a problem of understanding as
it was a political crisis, she argues that storytelling, as principled opposition to totali-
tarianism, is the way to bridge the abyss between philosophy and politics (Notes for
six lectures; the great tradition and the nature of totalitarianism 1953, cited in Disch
1994, 241). Totalitarianism was, therefore, an epistemological crisis as well as a
moral one that exceeded existing conceptual categories of the Western political tradi-
tion and that is why it was, in her view, as much a problem for science as it was for
moral philosophy. It has been argued that storytelling is the term Arendt uses to
describe critical understanding that comes from experience. For instance, in Between
past and future, she writes:
My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must
remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. (1977, 14)
Seyla Benhabib (1990), in her essay Hannah Arendt and the redemptive power
of storytelling suggests that while reflecting on the dilemmas that preoccupied
her, Arendt developed a conception of political theory as storytelling. Her
method, Benhabib argues further, [breaks] the chain of narrative continuity,
[stresses] fragmentariness, historical dead ends, failures and ruptures (1812).
Arendts method of writing history, then, was in clear defiance of the traditional
canons of historical narrative. She considered it, as the purpose of political theory,
to transcend the limitations of facts and information to tell a provocative and
principled story (On the nature of totalitarianism, 6, cited in Disch 1994, 140).
Young-Bruehl (1977), in her brief expos, described Arendt as having an
unfailing regard for the life of the story and a charming disregard for mere
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International Journal of Research & Method in Education 51
facts (183). There are, of course, facts as distinct from opinions and interpreta-
tions, but for Arendt facts alone cannot determine a historical narrative.
Arendt explains clearly why it is we do not tell stories in the academy. She
describes argumentation as a linear train of thought that carries its listeners along
an apparently purposive succession of ideas. If one should not tell stories to fellow
scholars it is not because stories are beneath them; rather, it is because to do so is to
make ones arguments vulnerable to challenge (Disch 1994, 3):
To begin with telling the anecdote of a real incident is against all the rules of the game;
but these rules are not absolute, they are rules of caution rather than laws of thought and
can hence be broken. (Action and the pursuit of happiness, cited in Disch 1994, 3)
Disch (1994) further argues that caution is advisable because storytelling discloses
the arbitrariness of the appearance of consistency, opens ones thought-musings to
rival orderings, and invites contrary interpretations of the incidents that inspired them
(3). Storytelling, then, can act as a methodological release point
2
to invite the unsaid,
the masked, the contested, the contradictory. Given such descriptions, it becomes
easier to imagine how story, then, became the centrepiece of Arendts writings on
totalitarianism. I am arguing here that it is, in fact, a lack of theoretical development
that has caused story as method in education to be at best light fare and at worse a
colonizing and conservative force. But this does not have to be the case. I now turn
more deliberately to the implications of Arendts theoretically rich renegade method
for research in the field of education more generally.
In my own field, for instance, while reading urban school research of all kinds and
particularly research that happens under the with/by/for young people rubric, I came
to identify a problem in the body of classroom-based empirical research with youth/
children and one I was concerned not to reproduce in my own work. In an effort to
give voice to young people, the data young peoples words and stories are often
summoned as in a kind of show and tell or a reality-test for those ideas or discov-
eries we might well already hold as truths. Empirical research of this kind, I thought,
must hold itself to the rigorous intellectual inquiry so important to the theorizing of
the everyday, to the conceptual and philosophical as well as the phenomenal realm.
This anaemic version of storytelling may in fact be an indication of a larger cultural
phenomenon that Walter Benjamin pointed to in his 1936 essay in which he argued
that experience, and in particular the communicability of experience and the art of
storytelling, had fallen in value; that the realities of the industrial revolution and the
barbarism of the First World War had impaired humankinds ability to feel and
process experience. Benjamin, who also saw story as essentially social in nature
and dialogic in method, had, of course, terrific influence on both Hannah Arendt and
Bertold Brecht.
In empirical education research, too often, this reality syndrome, a kind of inter-
pretively closed or over-explained story as illustrative case is devoid of the imag-
ination and theoretical probing necessary to produce new knowledge in the field. Often
enough, the words themselves, the citations culled to illustrate findings do not, alone,
articulate the profound new ideas one would hope to bring to light and worse, they
sometimes leave traces of imperial ink, of the kind we are cautioned about by Stephen
Brown (2004), Linda Tuiwai Smith (1999) and many others. Too often, this evidence
is left to stand in for what it is we already believe. Keeping it real and telling real
stories in other words often anchors researchers to only those things that can be or
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52 K.M. Gallagher
were spoken in the given context rather than using stories methodologically as
spaces for probing rival musings and interpretive openings. I desperately wanted to
resist this reductive and appropriating form of reporting in my own work. There is a
social science possible that does not divest experience of its ambiguities and contra-
dictions. I am interested in an applied social science and I wanted to make theoretically
and contextually rich the experiences we had with the youth in our study and to let
their words not simply illustrate but also interact, critically, with the complexities of
our research, the philosophical dimensions of our inquiry, and our own theoretical
constructions as researchers.
Storytelling as critical practice
Storytelling as a narrow, truth-telling method has had a strong foothold in education
research. This kind of storytelling is, of course, antithetical to the critical methods
developed and articulated by Arendt. Stories, whether theatrical or narrative, demand
interpretation; they cannot be taken literally. Resonant with Arendt, Lyotard (1984)
argues that it is their consensus-resisting capacities, their rejection of the linear, and
their capacity to hold fragments together, which make stories a particularly powerful
postmodern force. To provoke contestation, offers Lyotard, over the rules that
constrain the production of new ideas, is the potential force of storytelling. The move
to storytelling, according to these thinkers, is a critical one. The promise of story as
universal narrative, therefore, is an enlightenment promise that has lost its currency,
as has the truth of anthropological, and later educational, ethnographies. In their
schemes, storytelling takes on a polyvocality, rather than a telling it like it is. Or as
Benjamin himself understood it, half the art of storytelling was to keep a story free
from explanation as one reproduces it.
It is also in view of storytellings capacity to unearth how it is that stories of
cultures come to be taken as natural and unquestioned, that storytelling has come into
its greatest strengths and its closest proximity to critical theory. Rather than taking
experience and stories as the grounds for ethnographic authority in traditional forms
of research in both anthropology and education, ethnography as a storytelling method
for analyzing political and cultural practices in a field has brought us closer to
Arendts much earlier notion of the consensus-resisting, more dialectical, and circling
nature of storytelling. Her method, and current struggles to resist the ethnographic-
truth story, position storytelling not as a place at which to arrive, but as a place to
begin inquiry.
In the field of education, Madeleine Grumet (1990) has articulated a lovely meta-
phor that clearly picks up on Arendts re-consideration of Archimedean notions of
impartiality:
For some time many of us have been arguing that qualitative inquiry is an art rather than
a science. Having made that assertion, we quickly crawl into it for comfort. No longer
radically disassociated from the object of our inquiry and subjugated to the epistemolog-
ical loneliness that plagues the scientist, we bring together that which science has sepa-
rated and declare our connectedness, our continuity with our world. The problem of
validity ascertaining a concepts adequacy to the phenomenon to which it corresponds
is relegated, we think, to the skepticism of the Cartesians who must struggle to assert
connections they have denied.
The artist, on the other hand, admits the relation to the object that the scientist
represses. That is the message of Henry Jamess artist in The Real Thing (1893/1979).
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International Journal of Research & Method in Education 53
After struggling in vain to illustrate a text on the aristocracy by working with authentic
models, the artist finally has his servants pose, and it is their perception of class
difference that strikes the gestures he draws. His canvas depicts a relationship to the
phenomenon rather than a display of the thing itself. (101)
After having pulled it apart through objective research methods, storytelling as
method puts research back together as a partial and intersubjective critical experience.
In both Arendts and Grumets work, there is implicit a conception of critical thinking
that is born of experience. Storytelling is not a term Arendt defines precisely, but she
does call on a most useful metaphor thinking without a banister
3
in arguing how
storytelling can invite a situated critical thinking. Disch (1994) suitably describes the
process of thinking without a banister, as a call for a way of proceeding in which crit-
ical categories are not imposed on but inspired by ones engagement with a phenom-
enon (144). This orientation positions storytelling, as I have argued, as a place to
begin inquiry rather than as a place on which to fix pre-existing categories and mean-
ings. Storytelling is also something Arendt refers to as a rather unusual approach,
4
something Seyla Benhabib described as redemptive narrative which [redeems] the
memory of the dead, the defeated and the vanquished by making present to us once
more their failed hopes, their untrodden paths, and unfulfilled dreams (196). Equally
interesting to me, however, is Arendts redefining of objectivity and impartiality
through which she argues for a redefinition of validity that can be achieved by story-
telling from a committed moral perspective, rather than by an abstract, neutral stance.
5
As in historiography and education, there is a growing movement of storytelling
in legal scholarship. In her essay, Between justice and politics: The competition of
storytellers in the Eichman trial, Leora Bilsky opens with the lines: History
contains the word story, and every historian is also a storyteller. When history is put
on trial, who is the storyteller then? In this essay, Bilsky draws a strong line between
the thinking and works of Walter Benjamin and those of Hannah Arendt. For both,
there is a connection between story and judgement. For Benjamin, she argues, stories
provide their listeners with orientation and direction in the world:
This is so because each story contains a moment of judgment that is shared by the story-
teller and her listeners According to Benjamin, the counsel that the story provides is
less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story,
which is just unfolding. The disappearing art of storytelling in our modern age is taken
by Benjamin, therefore, to be a sign of a loss of way and direction for humanity. (Bilsky
2001, 238)
What is perhaps key to Arendts understanding of judgement, and the relation-
ship of the past to the future, is that she is a philosopher of action, not a fatalist.
In her historical narratives, she writes of how it could have been otherwise and
urges the telling of stories to avoid collective forgetfulness and the fixity of the
factual event. Judging, moreover, always happens in community, exercises the
imagination, and stimulates a plurality of the mind. In the next section, I will draw
a connection between judging and acting through stories and Bertold Brechts
theorizations of theatrical narrative. But first, a story from the field.
Stories of empirical research in education
Drawing was no more than copying, and I didnt care for art, all the more so because I
was not very good at it: I reacted to the general appearance of an object without paying
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54 K.M. Gallagher
much attention to its details; I could never succeed in drawing even the simplest flower.
In compensation, I knew how to use language and as it expressed the essence of things,
it illuminated them for me. I had a spontaneous urge to turn everything that happened to
me into a story: I used to talk freely, and loved to write. If I was describing in words an
episode in my life, I felt that it was being rescued from oblivion, that it would interest
others, and so be saved from extinction. I loved to make up stories, too: when they were
inspired by my own experience, they seemed to justify it; in one sense they were of no
use at all, but they were unique and irreplaceable, they existed, and I was proud of having
snatched them out of nothingness. (de Beauvoir 1959, 6770)
The theatre of urban: Youth and schooling in dangerous times (published by
University of Toronto Press, 2007), is based on my three-year ethnographic study of
the experiences of youth in urban drama classrooms and the dynamic social forces of
inclusion and exclusion experienced by them within their unique contexts of urban
North American schooling. It is a book about youth in urban drama classrooms, but it
is also a book about the theatre as a special window onto the larger theatre of school
life. In other words, I have been very interested in the social, artistic and political
meanings of theatre in schools. The ethnography of four urban sites two in Toronto,
two in New York city investigated the extent to which drama education and its
devices of fiction illuminated the intersections of youths personal/cultural lives with
their school lives in the formation of their social, academic and artistic identities.
In the following example, what I wish to illustrate is that a story as a case is
importantly different from storytelling as method. What one student, Neilas, own
storytelling does is to make explicit the endless possibilities of an interpretive act and
the ways in which storytelling can perform a multiplicity of potential understandings
rather than a confirmation of what is already understood, as in the illustrative case.
6
The storyteller, and through her work the researcher too, can open the story up to rival
musings. It is, as Benjamin suggested, less an answer to a question (what are the
prevailing narratives of Black urban youth?) than a proposal concerning the continu-
ation of a story, which is just unfolding. As a real story, it offers no transcendence,
no particular stable conclusion. But the act of telling the story opens up interpretive
and relational possibilities. How might the researcher interpret here in a way that both
constructs meaning and undoes the common sense of urban youth experience simul-
taneously? In other words, how might the researcher effectively deploy Brechts
process of alienation or Arendts thinking without a bannister?
The excerpted piece of a play (first and last scenes included here) was written by
a 17-year-old Ethiopian girl in a downtown Toronto school. She claimed to be bored
in school, so her drama teacher challenged her to write a play and tell her story.
According to Neelands (1990), one of the most important purposes of metaphor in
theatre is to invite comparison between what is being symbolically represented and the
real area of experience that is referred to.
Bleeding between the lines
By Niela H
Scene One
Yazmine: (she is narrating the story) To be or not to be that is the question: which
once a great writer William Shakespeare wrote. What did he meant by that? Im the
age of 17 and an only child of divorced Black African parents. I had a lot of time on
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International Journal of Research & Method in Education 55
my hands so I wrote poetry, lyrics and stories. Oh I forgot to introduce myself. My
name is Yazmine Ahmad, I know its not an African name but my parents wanted to
be different. I always wanted to be a singer, writer, model, or fashion designer but
things can hold you back like being in a grave six foot under with no way out. Youre
probably asking how did that happen to a 17 year old that doesnt do anything but
write. I have no answer to that but if you live in the hood, you dont have a problem
the problem have you.
Scene Fifteen (a week later: At Liyahs birthday party)
Yazmine: Is everyone love it?
People: yeah.
Yazmine: good.
(she walks over to the bar and hugs Liyah)
Yazmine: Happy birthday girl.
Liyah: Thanx girl.
Yazmine: No prob. Now lets have fun.
(she grabs Tamia and Liyah to the dance floor. Yazmines mom come to Liyah and hugs
her. Suddenly Andre and his boys walk in the club)
Yazmine: who told him about the party?
Tamia: I dont know.
(he comes behind Yazmine and kisses her at the back of her neck)
Yazmine: what do you want?
Andre: you.
Yazmine: Its over.
(Dwayne and his boys surround Andre and his boys)
Dwayne: I think you should leave her alone.
Andre: why? So you can fuck with her.
Dwayne: you think youre bad nigga?
Andre: Im the hardest nigga up in here.
Dwayne: yeah, you really think you the hardest nigga?
(they start pushing each other and Yazmine goes to break it up. Then Yazmine spot one
of Andres friends pull out a gun. She pulls Dwayne out of the way. Unlucky, the bullet
that was meant for him got her in her back.)
Dwayne: no.
Yazmine: its ok.
(Yazmines mother push away the crowd to find out that her only child was shot)
Yazmine: I love you.
Mother: Yazmine No!!! Why my baby?
Yazmine: well yeah thats my story and as you can see life isnt always fair. Thats
just the way it is.
The End
The play had two additional endings:
Ending Two
Dwayne: you think youre bad nigga?
Andre: Im the hardest nigga up in here.
Dwayne: yeah, you really think you the hardest nigga?
(They start pushing each other and Yazmine goes to break it up. Then Yazmine spot one
of Andres friends pull out a gun. She then grabs the gun from him and shoots his friend)
Dwayne: No Yazmine put the gun down.
Yazmine: No they almost killed you.
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56 K.M. Gallagher
(Then suddenly Andre shoots Dwayne)
Yazmine: No Dwayne no.
(Dwayne falls to the floor and she runs to him)
Yazmine: Dwayne talk to me.
Dwayne: I love you you was all I had.
Yazmine: Please dont go.
(he didnt answer she cries and turns to Andre)
Yazmine: This is for everything you did to me.
Andre: What are you going to do.
Yazmine: Shoot you I hope this hurt cuz I know I am.
Mother: Yazmine No.
(the screams of fear fills the air as he drops to the floor. Everyone runs out of the club
and the police runs in and arrest her)
Yazmine: Well yeah thats my story and as you can see life isnt always fair. Thats
just the way it is.
The End
Ending Three
Dwayne: you think youre bad nigga?
Andre: Im the hardest nigga up in here.
Dwayne: yeah, you really think you the hardest nigga?
(they start pushing each other and Yazmine goes to break it up. Then Yazmine spot one
of Andres friends pull out a gun. She pulls Dwayne out of the way. Unlucky, the bullet
that was meant for him got her in her back)
Dwayne: no.
Yazmine: its ok.
(Yazmines mother push away the crowd to find out that her only child was shot)
Yazmine: I love you.
Mother: Yazmine No!!! Why my baby?
(everything pause and lights are off. In a few moments Yazmine is on stage now with
spotlight on her)
Yazmine: STOP did you notice that every Black story end up like this its not like
it dont happen a lot but the point is that is shouldnt even happen can
someone give me a remote control
(someone walk on stage and gives her a controller)
Yazmine: Thanks. Now Im rewinding all this and go back to a place where I felt
peace, where I felt safe and where I can make a change So lets rewind
(everything rewind and now Yazmine is a little girl. She was sitting with her mom and
dad.)
Mother: So what did you talk about in school today?
(the mother is fixing Yazmines hair)
Yazmine: Well we was talking about what we want to be when we grow up.
Father: So what do you want to be?
Yazmine: I dont know but I know I want to be alive.
The End
(Gallagher 2007, 99102)
Arendt argues that we enter anothers standpoint through story and the circum-
stances that give rise to it. Rather than use Neilas story, above, to explain her life or
circumstances, however, Arendt might use literary rather than philosophical tools.
Given the data/story I have selected to share in the context of this examination, I now
offer both the orienting questions of interest I bring to the data and the analytic
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considerations I have taken on board in the work of my own analysis. I offer these as
examples of storytelling and interpretation as critical practice/method. They are ques-
tions and analytic considerations that might be asked in the context of many different
empirical research studies, and I have arrived at them through careful consideration
of the literary and philosophical probings of Arendt and Brecht.
Questions of interest
What is the relationship between the story and the life?
How can the limits of the empirical moment be made more explicit?
How do real stories talk back to hegemony, resist convergence, provoke the
untold?
What judgement do stories provoke, what openings to they foreclose, what fixi-
ties do they guarantee?
What methods resist consumption, appropriation, and containment in research
dissemination?
Analytic considerations
How has the student/storyteller internalized how the stories of cultures/people
come to be taken as natural? How is his version of things naturalized?
If we take this story as a starting rather than an end point, what does that do for
the analysis?
How can the researcher be with the research participant but not really at
home with this story? What does this stance productively afford?
7
In The life of the mind, Arendt describes representative thinking as populating ones
mind with a multiple cast of characters: [W]e can act only in concert, in company
and agreement with our peers, hence in an existential situation that effectively
prevents thinking (1978, 91). And here is where she draws closer to Brecht and the
collective enterprise of theatrical narrative. For both writers, solitude as a condition of
thinking is at odds with the conditions of acting.
Brechts notion of performing/storytelling has to do with standing together in the
public realm of theatre but standing apart from the story. In the scenes above, we can
see at work Brechts idea that bodies are expressive of a life of oppressions and that
social and ideological constraints shape actions. His idea of art was that one must
practice a kind of detachment in community, in order to judge. This method evokes
Arendts rejection of the Archimedean model, the absolute withdrawal, and her idea
rather of training the imagination to go visiting. Visiting, as distinct from thinking,
is the activity of the imagination in judging. Although Brecht did not describe his
work in the theatre in quite the same way, his continual call for distance in theatres
stories, and his rejection of the assimilationism of empathy (which he sometimes used
interchangeably with the term identification in his work) as a response to theatres
stories is clear. On empathy, Arendt (1977) writes:
This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand
somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is [not]
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58 K.M. Gallagher
a question of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else but of
being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. (241)
The idea that action is intimate but happens in community is also central. Arendt
(1968) says that public space springs up between men when they act together and
vanishes the moment they disperse (200). Moving closer still to Brecht, she writes,
Spectators exist only in the plural. The spectator is not involved in the act, but he is
always involved with fellow spectators (1982, 63). And Brecht (cited in Willet [ed.
and trans.] 1964), also drawing on notions of public and the popular, particularly in
Marxist terms of class struggle, defined action and theatre in the following way:
Our conception of the popular refers to the people who are not only fully involved in
the process of development but are actually taking it over, forcing, deciding it. We have
in mind a people that is making history and altering the work itself. We have in mind a
fighting people and also a fighting conception of popularity. (Brecht, cited in Willet
1964, 108)
In both conceptions of a public, one is imagined as with others but never really
at home in the familiar world. Whether it is storytelling as an alternative to the
judicial process, storytelling as alternative to historical fact, or storytelling through
the dialogue of theatre, Arendt urges that things of the world become human for us
only when we can discuss them with our fellows.
8
Neilas play, it strikes me, is a contemporary example of the dark times in which
many young urban people of colour live. When Arendt speaks, as she so often did,
about living in dark times, she is speaking about a time when theory no longer helps
us to act. Arendt explained that she borrowed the phrase dark times from Brechts
poem an Die Nachgeborenen, which begins Truly, I live in dark times! In it, the
narrator speaks of the present as a time in which wisdom and goodness have come
fatally apart from each other (cited in Luban 1983). The social conditions of his own,
Arendts and Neilas times illustrate, in frightening repetition, this conception of dark
times. The call to storytelling is a response all three give. In any one of Brechts
plays, but most notably Mother courage and her children, in most of Arendts story-
telling methods in political science and historiography and in Neilas play Bleeding
between the lines, dark times glaringly reveal the failures of traditional analysis and
conventional theory; the times exceed the categories. But in their stories, we see
animated the redeeming memory of the dead, the defeated and the vanquished by
making present to us once more their failed hopes, their untrodden paths, and unful-
filled dreams. (Benhabib 1990, 196)
In education research, the ethnographer is asked to go visiting to consider events
from unfamiliar standpoints. Visiting, in Arendts terms, and the alienation effect
in Brechts should distance us from the familiar but also bring us to new standpoints
that are unfamiliar. Too often, empirical research in education unremittingly drives
towards the familiar or so exoticizes (and appropriates) the unfamiliar, that new ideas
and actions are unthinkable. For Brecht, theatre is always attached to social change;
research, however, that creates identification or empathy two common features in
realist ethnography and the attendant storytelling is essentially conservative.
Education research would be well served by embracing the plurality of perspec-
tives so central to the theoriststorytellers, Arendt and Brecht. But, this article, of
course, merely begins a journey of attempting to ground theoretically what I have
recently experimented with empirically. In our study with youth in urban schools, we
began with the stories the youth told about their experiences of school, the relentless
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forms of documentation of their lives, the increased security and surveillance, the
strained relationships with authority, and we took to heart Brechts call to pull back in
order to see more clearly by improvising around these very ideas using the distancing
mechanism of the stage. Setting these concerns in an analogous world of a six-month
probationary review for workplace employees, we began to inquire into the social
conditions, the relationships, and the possibilities of such contexts of prohibition.
Theoretically, we began a process of judgement. This was an attempt not only to invite
the youth into the critical examination of their lives, but also to stand back from the
obvious, in order to see whether new categories of analysis became possible.
Story as method (a reprise)
There remain many competing theories about Arendts storytelling as method,
although there is some agreement that her method combines straightforward histor-
ical material and conceptual analysis with a variety of less orthodox and literary tech-
niques, and the stories of individual lives, to illustrate social and historical
transformations.
9
A fuller engagement with this method and richer understanding of
the accompanying theories may very well lift empirical, education research out of its
reality rut and make possible rival musings. One fundamental shift I have argued for
here requires positioning the research story as a place to begin inquiry, not a place on
which to settle meanings. For Brecht, I am, unfortunately, left with a methodological
problem with respect to his usefulness in education research. It has to do with the theo-
retical robustness of storytelling as method and finding the tools to create a process of
alienation, according to Brecht, necessary to all understanding. The problem lies,
specifically, in making methodologically sound the clear (and modernist) distinction
he makes between theatre for pleasure and theatre for instruction. He writes of the
alienating effect in theatre he so desired: The spectator was no longer allowed to
submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means
of simple empathy with the characters in a play. The production took the subject
matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation that is
necessary to all understanding. When something seems the most obvious thing in the
world (71), it means that any attempt to understand the work has been given up. What
is natural must have the force of what is startling.
Brecht here was resisting a response to theatre that would have been de rigour in
his time, that of the dramatic spectator. The dramatic spectator, like the traditional
narrative researcher, is looking to confirm previously held ideas; she/he does not wish
to disrupt what is already known, nor disturb a sense of the obvious, the rightness, the
trueness of something. The dramatic spectator then, like the researcher who uses story
to confirm reality, does not need to look too far in the quest to illustrate the obvious
or confirm comfortable truth claims. The dramatic theatres spectator says:
Yes, I have felt like that too Just like me Its only natural Itll never change The
sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable Thats great art; it all
seems the most obvious thing in the world I weep when they weep, I laugh when they
laugh.
By contrast, the epic theatres spectator says:
Id never have thought it Thats not the way Thats extraordinary, hardly believable
Its got to stop The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary
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60 K.M. Gallagher
Thats great art: nothing obvious in it I laugh when they weep. I weep when they laugh.
(in Willet [ed. and trans.] 1957/1963/1964, 71)
Hence the process of de-familiarization that Brecht so desired and that educational
researchers could effectively exploit.
But too often in education research unlike the duty of the epic theatre spectator
we look for, and find, the obvious. The realist tradition, and the perpetuation of the
obvious in the stories of education research, has long lingered in the public imagination.
Educational storytellers will need to break new ground and do so in theoretically robust
ways; their stories, in both form and content, need to provoke new imaginings. Unlike
traditional narrative structures, these stories need not carry, as Luban (1983) argues, a
statable lesson they will still illuminate. In this way, both Arendt and Brecht give me
a sense of the direction, but the particular practices, the moves forward are still emerg-
ing. It is most certainly lives and their works to which Arendt (1968) most often turns,
and that alone elevates story to its rightful place and reiterates an important course:
Even in the darkest times we have the right to expect some illumination and such
illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain,
flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their
works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that
was given them on earth. (ixx)
Storytelling as method is here to stay. This is as it should be. But more careful
consideration of the work that stories do in our research accounts, the judgement they
provoke, the openings they foreclose, and the fixities they guarantee remains a central
challenge. In this article, I have pushed towards a theoretical foundation for my own
storied accounts in research and have found some of the richest possibilities for such
a theoretical basis in the socio-historical and artistic methods of Hannah Arendt and
Bertold Brecht.
Notes
1. This brief essay will only draw from a limited range of works and tools of these writers, as
they pertain specifically to an emerging argument for greater theorizations of storytelling
in education research.
2. I thank Michelle Fine and Sara McLelland for their invention of this term. For a fuller
description of the idea of methodological release points, see McClelland and Fine (2008).
3. See Arendt (1979).
4. See Arendt (1953).
5. For a discussion on Arendts use of Kants concept of taste to defend storytelling as a crit-
ical practice, see Disch (1994).
6. I am deeply appreciative of one journal reviewers comments, which pushed me to make
this distinction more clearly.
7. The task in this article is not, of course, to answer these questions but to lay them out as an
interpretive/analytic framework for story-based empirical data.
8. See Arendt (1968).
9. See, for instance, Luban (1983) for a rich discussion of Hannah Arendts methodology of
storytelling.
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