Creating Spaces of Inquiry and Disruptions: Narrative Insights into a Reading Group.
Keywords:
autobiographical, community, pragmatist scholarship, reading I group, narrative inquiryAbstract
This paper is an autobiographical study of six university educators/researchers who participated in an ongoing four-year reading group focused on the writing of pragmatist scholars. In order to highlight key distinctions among well-known forms of reading groups and the reading group under study, we differentiate between these groups. Drawing on a table metaphor for engaging in dialogue as outlined by Arendt (1958) and Greene (1988), we highlight selected fragments from our dialogues in order to discern seven central features of the reading group. As narrative inquirers, we live, tell, and re-imagine stories to live by in relation to the different books we read, as well as with each other. Being a chosen community (Lindeman Nelson, 1995), we share underpinnings of what makes this reading group sustainable, and generative, as we view reading and engaging with each other as a form of re/search. Our work as a reading group became a way to create spaces of inquiry and to dwell within disruptions.