Narrative Inquiry in Music Education

Book excerpt: Margaret S. Barrett and Sandra L. Stauffer We live in a “congenial moment for stories” (Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007, p. 30), a time in which narrative has taken up a place in the “landscape” of inquiry in the social sciences. This renewed interest in storying and stories as both process and product (as eld text and research text) of inquiry may be attributed to various methodological and conceptual “turns,” including the linguistic and cultural, that have taken place in the humanities and social sciences over the past decades. The purpose of this book is to explore the “narrative turn” in music education, to - amine the uses of narrative inquiry for music education, and to cultivate ground for narrative inquiry to seed and ourish alongside other methodological approaches in music education. In a discipline whose early research strength was founded on an alignment with thesocialsciences,particularlythepsychometrictradition,oneofthekeychallenges for those embarking on narrative inquiry in music education is to ensure that its use is more than that of a “musical ornament,” an elaboration on the established themes of psychometric inquiry, those of measurement and certainty. We suggest that narrative inquiry is more than a “turn” (as noun), “a melodic embellishment that is played around a given note” (Encarta World English Dictionary, 2007, n. p. ); it is more than elaborationon a position, the adding of extra notes to make a melody more beautiful or interesting.