Narrative research summer course analyzes storytelling principles

Editor’s Note: The following story is part of a series featuring Oakland University courses offered in the 2009 Summer Semester. It is designed to highlight diverse opportunities for students to continue their education year round. For more information, visit www.oakland.edu/summer. 

By Amanda Benjamin, student writer

Narrative researcher Tom Barone will teach MUS 790: Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (two credits) for doctoral students and interested research faculty. The class will meet July 27-31, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Barone was invited to teach the course after giving a set of lectures about narrative research at Oakland University a few months ago. “I feel really honored and privileged to be invited, and I look forward to it,” he said. According to Jackie Wiggins, professor of music education, Barone is one of the two leading people who came up with the idea of narrative research.

Storytelling is essential to people’s lives, Wiggins said. “We make sense of the world through story or narrative.”

Narrative research is a relatively new approach to research, especially in education. There are two types: analysis of narratives and narrative composition. Analysis of narratives describes when researchers collect stories from teachers and analyze them, looking at issues that occur in a school setting. For narrative composition, researchers collect data through interviews and observations, and then put the information in the form of a story.

“It helps the reader better understand the perspective of the participant,” Wiggins said, “enabling the research work to be more transformative.”

This type of research allows researchers to see the issues that are taking place, communicate these ideas more effectively to others and portray them in a powerful and interesting way, Barone said. This makes it more accessible to people who are not in education because it avoids theoretical language that is often used in research writing.

Barone earned his doctorate at Stanford and teaches a similar class at Arizona State University. For more information, contact Jackie Wiggins at jwiggins@oakland.edu.