Stepping off the road : a narrative (of) inquiry
Date
1995
Authors
Kimpson, Sally Agnes
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Abstract
I am not sure I have told a coherent story, or even answered the questions I have been posing. I only know that I am bound by time, trying to meld the horizons of my past and present, in an effort to keep imaginative doorways open, trying to stay personal, to own what I am saying. Remaining at the centre is difficult. Old messages urge me to retreat to the margins where I can safely categorize what I have learned, which is to stay with the process as it unfolds, to construct myself anew by restorying my experience, weaving new webs of understanding.
This account of my struggles to understand the experience of being a woman returning to study in a university setting, first from the stories of others, then shifting to my own, renders visibility to the process of meaning making. Recursive moves abound, including writing about my experience of being a graduate student in the moments in which it unfolds, connecting me in a deeply grounded way with the research I describe. Changing direction by altering the method reveals the joining of two landscapes: a landscape of consciousness, and a landscape of action (Greene, 1987). It is this process of doing re-search--searching again and again and again, of finding and letting go, without prescribed method other than beginning with myself--that is foregrounded here to generate commentary, to stimulate readers to engage in their own self-reflective process, and perhaps to change.