Fellow of the Society of Education and Training (FSET QTLS)
A story about stories: an investigation into the role of storytelling in professional education
Georgina's research aims to understand the storytelling terrain in professional education, focusing specifically on teaching and nursing practitioner-educators. Storytelling’s current situation in education appears from the literature to be somewhat patchy and inconsistent, with contrasting, and to some extent, conflicting views evident. Whilst there are strong advocates for storytelling’s usage in Higher Education across disciplines (McDrury and Alterio, 2003; Moon, 2010; Lin, 2014), there is a distinctive lack of its presence in teaching text books and teaching programmes.
Using a narrative inquiry paradigm (Spector-Mersel, 2010) and an in-depth case-study, Georgina seeks to investigate practitioner-educators’ perceptions of storytelling. She is developing an analytical literary approach within the narrative inquiry paradigm and exploring the theoretical foundations of storytelling via Bourdieuan (1986) and Freirian (1973) lenses. The methodology combines observations of teaching with the use of story circles (Freire, 1973) to collect ‘authentic’ but semi-fictional practice stories (Kara, 2006) in order to gain a unique and multi-layered perspective on storytelling in education. Participants’ stories will be explored alongside her autobiographical writing employing “trickster methodology”. Trickster research companions, a wolf and a raven, will be used as provocateurs and imaginary research partners, who will challenge preconceptions and help Georgina to translate the intangible and tacit aspects of her research into tangible, explicit research stories.
