Insider and Outsider Analysis: Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Narratives of Seychelles’ Geography Education

Abstract

Narrative inquiry offers a rich and rigorous approach to making meaning of the everyday. This article extends the present terrain by suggesting that different narrative meaning-making processes can be layered and unlayered across individual and aggregate narratives. To illustrate this novel approach, geography teachers’ curriculum-making stories were constructed, deconstructed, and then reconstructed. The construction of a set of geography curriculum-making narratives required the use of an outsider, and then an insider, lens. A second outsider lens was used to deconstruct the narratives and link them to broader social, cultural, and historical events. The deconstruction exposed that, in the face of curriculum power struggles, teachers often struggled to take ownership of the geography curriculum. Reconstructing their stories revealed potential strategies for understanding and resisting curriculum control and developing a sense of professional self-worth. Overall, the methodological challenges and benefits of doing narrative research in education from both outsider/insider perspectives are demonstrated. The iterative application of different lenses forms part of a “negotiated” analytical approach that offers an innovative way to analyze everyday stories by setting them within the contexts of broader social change.