Narrative inquiry and anti-racist teaching: Considering foundational questions about (re)storying in struggles for racial justice

The strength of narrative inquiry research on teaching (NI) is that it amplifies the voice of practitioners, supports listening carefully to those who work most closely with children, and resists the way many other research paradigms function in practice as elaborate preemptory rationalizations for dismissing teachers' insights as myopic and biased. One of its limitations lies in the uncontestable fact that teachers—like everyone—are not perfect, that the demography of the teaching profession over-represents the majority population in most nations, that all teachers work in contexts shaped by a continuing history of racism, and therefore teachers' reports on their experiences are often compromised by the institutionalized racism and settler colonialism in which they are embedded. Like other research methods, NI is vulnerable to the influence of neoliberal discourses that locate the cause of racism in individual attitudes and neglect the need for teachers to find ways to address the systemic and institutionalized forms of racism affecting children's lives. This essay examines the way NI scholars can reduce the chances of complicity with systemic racism while maintaining their core commitment to respecting teachers' experience as an important source of educational insight.