Ethical Dilemmas in Relational Narrative Inquiry With Children

In the fall of a school year, the authors began work in an elementary inner-city school. Positioned as teacher researchers, they spent the year in a 3/4 classroom. Their inquiry intentions were to more fully understand the experiences of children, families, and teachers of diverse backgrounds as they engaged with each other in the school. They are experienced researchers who have worked with adults, teachers, teacher educators, and principals as coresearchers in other relational narrative inquiries. The authors imagined negotiating similar coresearcher relationships with children. However, as they worked to negotiate coresearcher relationships with children, they encountered new relational inquiry complexities. In this article, the authors explore these complexities and make explicit four tensions they experienced in the study. They suggest a need for negotiating an ethic of relational narrative inquiry alongside children as coresearchers.