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> Blog Posts > Storytelling research in international education and development: a resistance to, or reproduction of coloniality?

Storytelling research in international education and development: a resistance to, or reproduction of coloniality?

Posted on 03/02/2022 By Alison Buckler, Jennifer Agbaire, Joanna Wheeler, Faith Mkwananzi and Yusra Price

women collaborating

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 ‘real’ 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 – 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 ‘appropriate’ and ‘traditional’ 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 ‘solutions’ 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 ‘big data’ 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 ‘inescapable epistemological paradox’: mediating indigenous ways of knowing through non-indigenous means. Shenila Khoja-Moolji suggests that development research that platforms ‘voice’ 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 ‘authentic’ and ‘local’ 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’s 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 ‘in the open’. 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 – especially when they are working across contexts and especially when they are working under the banner of ‘development’ work.

Follow us on Twitter @Ibali_Network to find out more.

Authors

  • Alison Buckler

    Alison is a Senior Research Fellow at The Open University where she is convenor of the International Education research group and 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.

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  • Jennifer Agbaire

    Jennifer is a Research Associate at The Open University, UK, where she is managing and researching on the Ibali Network AHRC-funded project on storytelling and the educational inclusion of young people in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK. She is also an independent Research Associate on an IDRC-funded comparative project working with school leaders in Uganda, Kenya, Chile and the Philippines. Her research interests are around identities, equity and inclusion in education as well as innovative, creative, participatory and collaborative research approaches. Her work and experience span access, policy, leadership, teacher education and the teaching profession across all levels of education and with a greater focus on the Global South.Jennifer has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE) at the University of Bristol since January 2022.

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  • Joanna Wheeler

    I am founder and director of TransformativeStory. My current work focuses on how storytelling can cross social divides and challenge dominant political narratives of exclusion. Over the last 18 years, I have 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. I have 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. I am passionate about helping others learn to use storytelling to make research more inclusive.

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  • Faith 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.

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  • 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.

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