116 Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences
As a
study of a single case can add is displaying how larger social structures insin -
uate their way into individual consciousness and identity, and how these
socially constructed "selves" are then performed for (and with) an audience,
in this case the listener/interpreter.
Before moving on, I briefly interrogate the exemplar in relation to the core
methodological issues taken up in prior chapters. The definition of narrative
should be familiar to readers from Chapter 4: a bounded segment of talk that
is temporally ordered and recapitulates a sequence of events. As structural
analysts do, I transformed the oral narrative into a written text, parsing it into
clauses, retaining key features of the oral version needed to interrogate per -
formance features (e.g., shifts in verb tense, direct speech, creative language-
"urinologist"—and expressive sounds—"shhhh"). The action unfolds in
scenes, each representing a distinct time period, with a final coda that
"resolves" a conflict. Once again we see how interpretation is inseparable
from transcription. Unlike exemplars of structural narrative methods (see
Chapter 4), context gets considerable analytic attention here. I used thematic
material from earlier parts of the interview, and located the personal narra -
tive in broader historical and economic contexts, noting how public issues are
buried in a personal story about the last day at a factory job. I also include
myself as an active participant in the narrative and its interpretation—a dis-
tinguishing feature of dialogic/performance analysis.
The next two exemplars go beyond the limitation of a single research
interviews to look at how identities are performed in everyday settings. Both
investigators worked ethnographically in schools and, in different ways, con-
structed situations that allowed them to see identities being developed and
expressed in collaborative performances. Extending a theme from the earlier
case study, the two investigations show how class and racial identities work
their way into group performances. In lively classroom discussions, readers
see how talk among speakers is dialogically produced and interpreted, with
the investigator active throughout.
Raising Their Voices: Mad Girls in the Classroom
Psychologist Lyn Mikel Brown studied the schooling experiences of a small
group of outspoken white preadolescent girls from two different cultural
communities in rural Maine." Brown's work is particularly interesting
because detailed study of the impact of social class on white youth is rare in
the United States (though common in Britain), 32 where political discourse
almost always feeds on stereotypes of poor urban black youth. Research
Dialogic/Performance Analysis 117
neglects whiteness as a racial identity and rural experiences of class.
way to understand white girls' understandings of their schools and teachers,
Brown "hung out" over an extended period with two groups of eleven- and
twelve-year-old girls who met weekly or, in some cases, bimonthly, in their
respective public schools with a teacher/facilitator. She worked collabora -
tively with the teacher/facilitator in each group. Group sessions were video -
taped, and interviews supplemented ethnographic observation. The
communities served by the contrasting schools differ significantly: "Arcadia"
parents are highly educated with professional careers; "Mansfield" parents
live on the edge, devastated by mill closings and industrial downsizing. In
lively discussion groups in each school setting, girls spoke about their rela -
tionships with one another, their families, teachers, and schools. Raw angry
emotions permeated discussions, captured in Brown's choice of a chapter
title, "Mad Girls in the Classroom."
Her book draws attention to neglected subjects in educational research,
namely girls' "strong feelings, particularly of anger, their critical opinions
about their schools, their conceptions of what it means to be female, and
their critique of (and resistance to) dominant expectations of femininity.'
Using Bakhtin as a theoretical resource, Brown attends to the polyphonic
nature of voice, or the "the non-linear, nontransparent interplay and orches -
tration of feelings and thoughts" 34—wha t others might refer to as power and
positionality in girls' talk.
A voice-centered method of data analysis (based on the Listening Guide
developed earlier by Brown, Gilligan, Taylor, and colleagues 35) required five
distinct listenings (and viewings, in the case of videotapes) of each interview
and group session. Note how in the first, the investigator explicitly locates
her position and subjectivity in the interpretative process, before attending
in the second listening to thematic elements in the talk:
First I attended to the overall shape of the dialogue or narrative and to the
research relationship—that is, I considered how my own position as a white
middle-class academic with a working-class childhood affected the girls' per -
ceptions of me, our interactions, and my interpretations of their voices and
behaviors. . . . I tracked my feelings and thoughts, my questions and confu -
sions, as I interpreted the girls voices. The second [listening] . . . attended to
the girls' first-person voices, to the ways they speak for and about them -
selves. . . . I also listened to the girls' gossip and put-downs of their peers and
siblings to established whom they considered "Other" and why. 36
The third "listening" is particularly relevant to the thematic content of the
narrative excerpts below: