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

AbstractTraditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of filmproduction. 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 animaginative, tangible, and reflexive space for narrative inquirers to work with the complexity of restorying livedlives in educational research. We draw on Sibonelo’s reflections on using the storyboard in his doctoraldissertation and offer our subsequent dialogues on his reflections as the data for this article. Our learningsindicate that storyboarding opens-up researcher subjectivity in the restorying process. In engaging criticalfriends, it serves as a space for the mediation of multiple perspectives and meanings of participants’ lived livesand is an imaginative space in which to filter creatively large amounts of field texts. We thus suggest thatstoryboarding enhances verisimilitude in the restorying process. Keywords: critical friend, narrative analysis, narrative inquiry, productive ambiguity, storyboarding,verisimilitude, visual researc

Developing a supervisor identity through experiential learning

One of the critical tasks of academics in any research intensive university is the supervision of postgraduate students. Given the central role of this activity, how novice academics’ learn the supervision is significant. This paper was co-authored by three interdisciplinary novice academics in a research-intensive university, specifically in its school of education. The paper focuses on the novice supervisors’ learning of their supervision role. Through the narrative inquiry methodology, the narratives of the three participating novice supervisors, who are also co-authors of this paper, were solicited and examined. The study found the participating novice supervisors playing a proactive role in exploring different sources to harness knowledge pertaining to supervision. This proactive role was effective in enabling full control over their learning and cognition of themselves as supervisors, which in turn enhanced their ability to learn the role

Construction of self as a principal : meanings gleaned from narratives of novice school principals

It is assumed that individuals’ cognitions of who they are in a particular social structure influence their behaviour in that space. Likewise, school principals’ cognition of who they are in schools as social structures influences how they behave as leaders. In this article, we use the role identity theory as a framework to analyse novice principals’ narratives of lived experiences to understand how they construct themselves as principals in schools and how these constructions influence their execution of leadership. Positioned within the interpretivist paradigm, we adopted the narrative inquiry methodology to engage with the lived experiences of 3 purposively selected novice principals from the Pinetown district in KwaZulu-Natal. The narrative interview was employed to generate field texts, which were subsequently analysed using 2 methods: narrative analysis and analysis of narratives. From our analysis of field texts, 4 themes explaining how the participating novice principals construct themselves as school principals were identified; these themes are: a leader as a learner, re-establishing oneself as a leader, spanning boundaries, and leading to inspire. From these themes, we conclude that a principal’s conception of self is dynamic and is a blend of multiple meanings generated prior to becoming a principal and meanings generated during the principalship tenure.http://www.sajournalofeducation.co.zahj2022Education Management and Policy Studie