Discursive transitions, emotional displays and silences: a multimodal approach to exploring narrative spaces of self-production

In the paper I present I will discuss my use of a multimodal approach to undertaking life history narrative (LHN) interviews. The interviews were conducted in North West England as part of a three year research project exploring the career progression and professional experiences of qualified teachers engaged in postgraduate study designed to enhance provision for pupils aged 5-18 with special educational needs. The theoretical stance taken is interpretivist; I seek to explore how the meanings attached to phenomena or practices are constructed and enacted locally. A seminal writer in this area is Goffman (1974:10) who suggests that research should investigate basic “frameworks of understanding” to study how meaning is constructed by individuals through talk and action. The work of Goffman has been extended and applied by Silverman (1997:82) who identifies talk as producing a shared social reality “as speakers modify and embellish each other’s accounts”. The work of Goffman and Silverman suggests that interview transcripts can be studied to explore how people communicate their view of the world and themselves as they talk about their experiences, offer opinions or express emotions. I engage with this idea to consider how the multimodal communication that occurs within a LHN interview can produce a shared reality. Undertaking narrative interviews entwines theory and method in that it encourages the researcher to think about the temporal and social context of the events being described, and the temporal and social context of the interview within which the stories are chosen and narrated. It enables an investigation of how individuals draw upon “narrative resources” to tell particular stories at certain moments in time (Burns and Bell, 2011:4). My implementation of narrative research draws on the approach advocated by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) who undertake LHN interviews to think through how such methods “render life experiences, both personal and social, in relevant and meaningful ways” (Connelly and ...