Narrative Inquiry

At least once a year, I teach a graduate course titled Narrative Inquiry. At the beginning of the course I always inform students that they will not likely learn how to do narrative inquiry in the narrative inquiry course. Instead they will interrogate the strategies, purposes, practices, and challenges of narrative inquiry, and they will learn how complicated, even messy, the whole business of narrative inquiry really is. I organize the course around an investigation of three principal dynamics involved in narrative inquiry: story, interpretation, and discourse. I invite students to consider matters related to story and interpretation, but I encourage them especially to attend to the art of discourse.