A NARRATIVE INQUIRY INTO THE CONSTRUCTION OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE/IDENTITY IN HEALTH CARE

There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography (Valery)
The craftman’s [sic] consciousness of materials appears in the long history of making bricks, a history that stretches from ancient Mesopotamia to our own time, a history that shows the way anonymous workers can leave traces of themselves in inanimate things (Sennett)

Narrative is ‘the invented story that accompanies history’ and answers the question, “Who are you?” (Leggo)

Narrative practitioners (and researchers) contend that we make sense of our professional practice through stories. My thesis aims to be both an exploration and demonstration of narrative inquiry in professional practice.

I am informed by multiple notions of narrative including: narrative as metaphor; narrative as inquiry as well as teaching and learning with stories. I am particularly intrigued by narrative understandings of identity and the notion of ‘storying professional identity’ -- and the possibilities for creating ‘rich’ descriptions of our professional selves that acknowledge the sometimes submerged stories or ‘traces of ourselves’ in our work as clinicians and health care providers.

Guided by relational and constructionist understandings of identity, I am interested in exploring the construction and co-creation of identity in professional practice -- with particular attention to the connection between the personal and the professional: in other words, the intersection between ‘who we are and what we do’. As Charon ( ) reflects in discussing the role of personal narrative and autobiography in health professional training, “When health care professionals write reflectively about their practice, they learn how interwoven are stories of patients and story of self”. I believe this approach opens up possibilities and offers an alternative to the modernist discourses that characterize much of the social sciences and health professions.

As a social worker and educator I have long been inspired by the role of arts-based inquiry in creating space for different kinds of conversations within health care and professional practice. I intend to explore the use of creative and aesthetic strategies in narrative inquiry and the construction of personal/professional narratives. Guided by a commitment to a ‘not knowing’ stance, uncertainty and multiple voices, I borrow Marcus O’Donnell’s statement to express the unfolding nature of the research process, “Like the very notion of identity that it attempts to describe, this text is provisional.”