Situating Narrative-Minded Research: A Commentary on Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak's "Telling Identities"

Abstract

In their “Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity” (Educational Researcher, May 2005), Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak articulate the promise of story or narrative in defining identity as an analytic tool in sociocultural research on learning. The article, as I read it, strives toward a process-rich notion of identity that responds to prior sociocultural articulations of identity as an analytic construct (e.g., Gee, 2001; Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Noting the dangers of treating identity as a product or an essential core that remains static over a lifetime—or that boils down to “is-statements” about “being a certain kind of person” (p. 16)— Sfard and Prusak theorize identity as a relational and dynamic process. That is, identity changes across time (cf. Lemke, 2000) and space (cf. Gee, 2001), and thus is always in motion. These changes depend, at least in part, on social and contextual interactions, rather than on inner or individual processes alone. Theorizing identity as a process, the authors propose narrative, or story, as a definition that can allow the term identity to serve as a “missing link” (p. 15) for understanding individual learning in sociocultural contexts. The authors propose to “equate identities with stories about persons” (p. 14), which I shall refer to as the identity-as-narrative construct. Narratives provide a mechanism for capturing the always-in-motion process of identifying, because they are “discursive counterparts of one’s lived experiences” (p. 17, emphasis in original). The authors build a theory of learning using this narrativized definition of identity. Sfard and Prusak distinguish between two sets of possible narratives about persons: “actual identities” and “designated identities” (p. 18). Whereas actual identities consist of “stories about the actual state of affairs” (p. 18), designated identities consist of “narratives presenting a state of affairs which, for one reason or another, is expected to be the case, if not now then in the future” (p. 18, emphasis in original). The authors define learning, finally, as closing the gap between actual and designated identity.1 Illustrating this argument, an empirical example compares native and immigrant Israeli mathematics students (and a representative individual within each collective). Sfard and Prusak conclude with a call for “narrative-minded researchers” to shed new light on learning as cultural activity (p. 21). Sharing Sfard and Prusak’s goals for increasing narrativeminded research, I aim to clarify the term narrative, which is not defined in their article. Specifically, I elaborate two central issues. Sfard and Prusak locate the identity-as-narrative construct within a sociocultural tradition. Because the term sociocultural has been widely and divergently used in educational research, I clarify this term in relation to the identity-as-narrative construct. I identify two genealogies of sociocultural work on narrative. Situating the identity-as-narrative construct in the American sociolinguistic tradition affords a useful definition of narrative as a unit of discourse that is distinct from non-narrative discourse. Further elaborating this affordance, the second section addresses the identityas-narrative construct from a methodological standpoint. By conceptualizing narrative-minded research work as a series of rhetorical processes and choices, this discussion untangles some of the complexities of narrative definition, identification, translation, and transcription. This response, in further fleshing out Sfard and Prusak’s argument about narrative, should contribute to the project of rendering the identity-as-narrative construct explicit enough for use in the practice of research. I hope, too, that these clarifying remarks will bolster the likelihood of this construct being used credibly and generatively in educational research.

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