ABSTRACT
Until recently (Conole et al., 2008; Creanor et al., 2006), the contribution of narrative methodology to understanding learning experiences of professionals in online learning contexts has been neglected. This is despite established interest in narrative methods within medical practitioner development (Greenhalgh, 2006; Greenhalgh et al., 2005; Greenhalgh and Hurwitz, 1999), based on the conviction, borrowed from research in the social sciences, that such methods have the flexibility that is necessary to capture and record the complexities of human experiential phenomena (Elliott, 2005; Czarniawska, 2004). Cortazzi (2001) has argued that narrative can enable understanding of learning experiences from the perspectives of the learner, the researcher and/or the medical educator. For the learner, constructing narratives about their experiences is a way to
organise and interpret experience and communicate it memorably in social contexts. In several ways, narratives make sense and give coherence to our personal and professional lives. (Cortazzi, 2001, p.1)
190Thus learners’ narratives provide accounts in which they organise their experience to make it meaningful to them and communicable and comprehensible to others in dialogic contexts. For the researcher, ‘narrative analysis can offer particular insights and challenges regarding concepts of context, interviewing, participants’ accounts, representations of meaning, and performance in research’ and is particularly applicable to ‘the construction and representation of experience and development’ (Cortazzi, 2001).