Situating Narrative-Minded Research: A Commentary on Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak's" Telling Identities"
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER, 35 (9):
13-21 (2006)Abstract
In their "Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity" (Educational Researcher, May 2005), Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak articulate the promise of story or narrative in defining identity as an analytic tool in sociocultural research on learning. The article, as I read it, strives toward a process-rich notion of identity that responds
to prior sociocultural articulations of identity as an analytic construct (e.g., Gee, 2001; Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Noting the dangers of treating identity as a product or an essential core that remains static over a lifetime—or that boils down to “is-statements” about “being a certain kind of person” (p. 16) - Sfard and Prusak theorize identity as a relational and dynamic process. That is, identity changes across time (cf. Lemke, 2000) and space (cf. Gee, 2001), and thus is always in motion. These changes depend, at least in part, on social and contextual interactions, rather than on inner or individual processes alone.