Chronicles of Change: The Narrative Turn and E-Learning Research

Abstract

Narrative case research has been widely utilized in educational inquiry to investigate different and changing positions and perspectives on questions of identity, curriculum and classroom practice. Despite the fact that case-study research of this kind is well suited to the investigation of changing technologies and their interpretation in different classroom settings, narrative methods have been little utilized in e-learning research. This article addresses this situation first of all by presenting psychologist Jerome Bruner's understanding of narrative as both a pervasive mode of cognition and a formal mode of inquiry – a dual emphasis that is central to understanding narrative as a research method. It then describes the elicitation of an individual teacher's narrative in an ‘active interview’ context, and presents her account of the adaptation of blog technology in a writing class. The article examines the ways in which teacher and technology are presented as agents of change in this narrative, and compares this to other, more common but less explicitly ‘narrative’ accounts in e-learning research. In doing so, the article makes significant reference to Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of ‘meta-narratives’, arguing that that the overarching meta-narrative of technological progress still informs a great deal of research in e-learning. It concludes by making the case that the influence of this particular meta-narrative should be balanced by attention to multiple ‘micro-narratives’, which tend to tell rather different stories.