julia.leong@me.com

Photo by Julia Leong 2009

“We teach who we are”
Parker Palmer
• Ask yourself:
Who is the self that teaches?

My identity

Multiple identities
• Our narratives can not have a single strand
• Need to know -What brings us together in
community?
• To help decide what education should
mean? No longer a consensus

Imagination

Empathy
• Maxine Green “of all our cognitive
capacities, imagination is the one that
permits us to give credence to alternate
realities.”

What is Narrative
Inquiry?

Narrative Inquiry
investigates:
• How to compose a story that represents
experiences truthfully while also
acknowledging that we can never really
tell the whole truth

Narrative Inquiry
investigates:
• How to compose a story that represents
experiences truthfully while also
acknowledging that we can never really
tell the whole truth

Narrative Inquiry
investigates:
How to compose a story that represents
experiences truthfully while also
acknowledging that we can never really
tell the whole truth

Narrative Inquiry
investigates:
• is one of trying to make sense of life as
lived. (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000)
• focus on composition of a story
as a way to represent experiences

Consider the human subject-
• Who are they?
• Write an account from their POV (or the POV of
the subject being photographed)
• Context: where when, by whom, why was it
taken?
• What are the aesthetics of the image? Does it
conform to a convention? What technologies were
used?
• What is the photo’s currency? Who was it made
for? Where is it kept? Who viewed it? Who has it
now?

POV
What is he thinking?

Write another sentence about what is he thinking.
This is from the first person point of view.

Write another sentence about what is he thinking.

• What are the aesthetics of the image? Does it
conform to a convention? What technologies were used?

“...it may be that to understand
ourselves as fictions, is to understand
ourselves as fully as we can,” Jeanette Winterston

Ted Aoki “Whenever I write a story,
I not only produce a narrative but
I’m reproducing myself...
the narrating acts upon me,
and I’m changing”

Whenever I compose a visual narrative,
I not only produce a narrative but
I’m reproducing myself...
the narrating acts upon me,
and I’m changing.

Forms of
Narrative Inquiry
• autobiography
• action research
• life writing
• ethnography, biography,
• art/o/graphy

Art/o/graphy
• It brings together the art of observation,
reflection and creative expression through a
process of discovery and documentation.
• How do our photos shape our memory?
• How are experiences articulated through
images?
• What is the role of visual awareness?

30 pounds of pack,
eight hour ascent,
infinite bugs biting,
anticipating arrival...

priceless

Place, Time, Self/other
• Place - indoor/outdoor
• enclosed, claustrophobia, open spaces, city/
country, relationships between objects in
places
• feelings created by place
• How can you use composition, clr, textures
to emphasize place/space or lack of it?

Holocaust Memorial, Boston

Time

VISUALNARRATIVES
Bounce
Aspects of visual narratives
Context, Object, Time
Julia Leong
Everyone has a story to tell.
For me, as a hybrid, standing

• Hanna Arendt - the role of pedagogy is to
introduce students as newcomers to the
world as it is, not just as we see it.

I need you in order to see myself

Where are the intersections in our
points of viewing?

Where are the intersections in our
theories of teaching?

Where are the intersections in our
understandings of learning?

How is remix culture
shaping youth identity?