Restorying lived lives in educational research: Storyboarding as a creative space for scholarly thinking in narrative analysis

Abstract

Traditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of film production. In this article, we focus on its use as a creative space for analysis in educational research. Specifically, we make visible our learnings, as social science researchers, about storyboarding as an imaginative, tangible, and reflexive space for narrative inquirers to work with the complexity of restorying lived lives in educational research. We draw on Sibonelo's reflections on using the storyboard in his doctoral dissertation and offer our subsequent dialogues on his reflections as the data for this article. Our learnings indicate that storyboarding opens-up researcher subjectivity in the restorying process. In engaging critical friends, it serves as a space for the mediation of multiple perspectives and meanings of participants' lived lives and is an imaginative space in which to filter creatively large amounts of field texts. We thus suggest that storyboarding enhances verisimilitude in the restorying process.