Finding the Narrative in Narrative Research
ur initial article in this issue of Educational Researcher (Coulter Smith, 2009) has a narrative of its own? one that stretches over more than 3 years and includes responses from scores of readers, editors, critics, and champions. Throughout this history, we clung tight to a singular purpose: to describe and illustrate with pieces of text some literary prac tices useful for crafting results into narratives. The readership we wanted to reach was education researchers in general, many of whom are unfamiliar with the rich literature on narrative research and literary practices. In this literature there is much about theory of narrative and little about the simple definition of narrative or its aspects. We wanted to locate the "narrative" in narrative research by drawing on narratology and the practices of writers.