糖心传媒

Storytelling is gaining popularity as a methodology in the field of international education and development. It is seen to offer an antidote to modernist, big-data research that positions people at the centre of interventions as homogenous and, instead, connect the field with 鈥榬eal鈥� versions of people. Advocates claim that it is inclusive, flattens hierarchies of power within research, is enjoyable, therapeutic, highlights inequality, sparks personal, social and political change, aligns with indigenous ontologies, reveals minority narratives while exposing and challenging majority narratives and lifts research out of exclusionary academic spaces to engage wider publics.

We are a collective of education and inclusion researchers working in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK embarking on a new AHRC-funded project on storytelling. Through our research using storytelling approaches across a range of studies, over several decades, we have seen evidence of its positive potential. But we have also seen that positive outcomes are not always guaranteed. Storytelling research carries risks in relation to ethics, participant and facilitator well-being, the reproduction of colonial ways of generating knowledge and the reproduction of colonial domination over ways of knowing. The idealisation of storytelling research can reinforce inequality rather than challenge it.

We met through the Ibali Network 鈥� an AHRC/GCRF-funded initiative that brought together storytelling academics and practitioners from across the world (but with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa). Through Ibali we identified that early career education and development researchers in African institutions are often steered towards data sciences and away from the creative arts. When storytelling is positioned as an 鈥榓ppropriate鈥� and 鈥榯raditional鈥� approach for research in lower-income countries, but students in higher-income countries are privileged in relation to learning about creative, arts-based approaches, it entrenches the idea that not only are the 鈥榮olutions鈥� to challenges in education seen to lie within higher-income country institutions, the capacity for researching these challenges creatively is too.

Furthermore, there is at least an element of transparency around how the 鈥榖ig data鈥� that dominates much of international education and development research limits diverse ways of knowing. We suggest that the framing of storytelling by higher-income countries (especially those which have a history of colonial domination) as an appropriate research approach for lower-income countries (especially those which have been colonised) gives the impression of valuing diverse ways of knowing, but risks controlling what kinds of stories and storytelling are used and/or are useful. Many storytelling approaches in development research draw on techniques popularised in the 1970s and 1980s by high-income country researchers and practitioners, which echoes what Sally Falk Moore called an 鈥榠nescapable epistemological paradox鈥�: mediating indigenous ways of knowing through non-indigenous means. Shenila Khoja-Moolji suggests that development research that platforms 鈥榲oice鈥� represents an obsession with dialogue and is often used in a way that is incompatible with the epistemologies and genuine needs of research participants. Storyfied depictions of lives can be tokenistic, romanticised or reductive (or all three). On the other hand, as argued by Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the use of more 鈥榓uthentic鈥� and 鈥榣ocal鈥� storytelling approaches carries risks of exploitation, co-optation and appropriation.

So, does storytelling research reproduce or resist coloniality? The question can feel paralysing, but we are working together to respond to this question by interrogating, challenging, refining and improving our storytelling practice. We are developing a storytelling research study with young people and teachers in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK that is empirically focussed on ideas and experiences of educational inclusion/exclusion. However, in parallel we are planning a critical exploration of this storytelling work, undertaken by three ethnographers trained in the UK, South Africa and Nigeria respectively. The ethnographers will individually and collaboratively document and analyse the storytelling process in each country. They will explore how researchers and participants from different contexts and in different contexts make sense of storytelling as a meaningful approach to researching and articulating people鈥檚 lived experiences.

We do not consider this to be an autoethnography, but an iterative, critically reflective and dialogical research design where we are committed to learning about how we carry out and communicate storytelling research and committed to sharing this learning by researching 鈥榠n the open鈥�. We will do this through an online Storytelling Research Hub (coming soon!) which will bring together ideas and debates on different ways of using story in education and development research, and the challenges, strategies and possibilities involved. The Hub will also showcase ideas from across our network around how researchers and practitioners can work more critically and creatively with storytelling approaches in specific contexts.

Ultimately, while we are passionate about storytelling research, we recognise that more critical work needs to be done to support researchers to engage in a process that is more epistemologically, geo-politically and ethically informed 鈥� especially when they are working across contexts and especially when they are working under the banner of 鈥榙evelopment鈥� work.

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Alison Buckler

Alison Buckler is a Senior Research Fellow at The Open University where she is Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Development. Her work focuses on using creative and narrative approaches to researching education, and she is the co-founder of the Ibali Network which supports people interested in using storytelling methodologies. She has been a member of the 糖心传媒 Executive Committee since 2015, serving as Secretary between 2018-2020, and Vice-Chair between 2020-2024.

Jennifer Agbaire

Jennifer Agbaire is a Lecturer in Education at the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at The Open University. She currently Chairs the Open University鈥檚 Masters in Education Stage 2 Inclusive Practice module and is the Deputy Chair of the dissertation module. She also co-leads Early Career Researcher (ECR) development at the OU鈥檚 Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD). Her teaching, research, impact and knowledge exchange work centre issues of social inequalities, educational inclusion, equity and social justice 鈥� her work particularly stem from her interest in marginalised identities. Jennifer鈥檚 interest and work also extends to community-centred creative, co-creative and innovative research approaches as well as the ethics and inclusivity of research and professional practices. She is involved in interdisciplinary and multi-partnership projects in these areas, with experience that spans access, policy, leadership, teaching and teacher education across all levels of education.

Joanna Wheeler

Joanna is founder and director of TransformativeStory. Her current work focuses on how storytelling can cross social divides and challenge dominant political narratives of exclusion. Over the last 18 years, she has conducted more than 80 storytelling processes around the world, combining personal and collective forms of storytelling using drawing, dance, music, drama, photography, video, audio, and sculpture. She has worked with a wide range of groups, from activists against sexual violence in Cape Town to young people from southern Africa working for gender equity.

Faith W Mkwananzi

Faith Mkwananzi is Researcher at the University of the Free State, South Africa, and recipient of the 2018 Cape Town Ibali Storytelling Training Award. Her work centres on higher education, migration, youth, and development in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is interested in engaging creative participatory methodologies to bridge the gap between researchers and development practitioners and civil society at large.

Yusra Price

Yusra is an independent anthropologist, educator, researcher and facilitator who cannot settle on a single occupation but dabbles in many interrelated work practices. She holds a Masters in Anthropology from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and specializes in Education and Storytelling. At tertiary education level, her current focus is on pedagogy of methodologies within anthropology and the broader social sciences. She is interested in how researchers are cultivated and in the kinds of innovations educators have developed to foster research sensibilities that are contextually and ethically driven. She is a member and lead ethnographer for the iBali network, supported by The Open University, which will use a storytelling for transformation approach to understand inclusion and exclusion in education across South Africa, Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Her storywork is located in community engagement and advocacy where a participatory and people-centred approach tries to assist others in achieving social justice.