Understanding the learning experiences of postgraduate Latin American students in a UK context: A narrative approach

Abstract

Researching the learning experiences of postgraduate students requires a different type of qualitative research to enable access to areas of their lives which may well remain hidden with more conventional methods of research. Narrative inquiry as both method and methodology allows such access. In this article, I focus on the use, appropriateness, philosophical underpinnings, discovered complexities and implications for my own teaching practice of the use of narrative inquiry in my current doctoral research. Focusing on Latin Americans, as the literature is surprisingly silent concerning such students’ experiences in a UK context, I want to gain a deeper insight into what it is really like to have previously been a professional and to now be a postgraduate international student in the UK. My hope, therefore, is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of these students through their experiences to allow their voices to be heard. It is also expected that these experiences will shed light on how this understanding can be used in my syllabus and approach to teaching (see Dewey 1938/1997). As a practitioner researcher using narrative inquiry, reflexivity is key: when researchers are in the field, “they are never there as disembodied recorders of someone else’s experience. They too are having an experience, the experience of the inquiry that entails the experience they set out to explore” (Clandinin and Connelly 2000: 81).