PNI Practicum

More details

This is the presentation you'll use as you begin the course.

And here is the course syllabus.

PNI Practicum I: Smaller-scale PNI

In this course you will:

• Choose a topic of common interest to your group, family, community, or organization
• Select and adapt a set of questions that elicit stories about experiences related to the topic
• Conduct a series of individual and group interviews and story-sharing sessions
• Gather 24+ stories from 6+ participants
• Prepare the stories for use in sensemaking
• Facilitate sensemaking sessions in which people work with the stories to make sense of the topic together
• Complete your project by returning the stories to the community and/or writing a project report

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Requirements

This course requires a cohort of at least 7 students, at least one of whom is comfortable facilitating group interactions. You will need to find a time and place to meet and to share working spaces and documents (online or in physical space).

The course requires a time investment (per student) of 6-8 hours per week (including class time) for 17 weeks. If you take the course with another student, or if you find a collaborator in your course cohort, you might be able to save some time by working together on a shared project.

In your course project, you will gather at least 24 stories and use them to support group sensemaking. You can start the course without a specific project in mind, but you will need to find at least 6 project participants who are willing and able to spend a few hours participating in interviews and/or group sessions on a topic of common interest.

Meetings

This course relies on weekly 2-hour online calls that alternate between project progress meetings (in which you share what happened in your project, talk about your plans, and get feedback) and sandbox meetings (in which you participate in group exercises and discuss facilitation techniques).

Why take this course?

This course is for you if you want to:

• Deal with a pressing problem. If you would like to address a specific problem in your community or organization, this course can help you make sense of what is happening and discover new solutions.
• Give PNI a try. If you think PNI might be useful to your community or organization, this course can help you evaluate PNI's potential to meet your needs.
• Walk the path of stories. If you love stories and everything to do with them, this course can help you turn your passion into a valuable skill you can use to help people and grow your career.
• Add PNI to your bag of tricks. If you are an educator or facilitator, this course can help you broaden and diversify your groupworks skillset, complementing other methods you use in your classrooms and workshops.
• Ground your research in stories. If you are working on a master's or PhD project, you can use this course to carry out a pilot study on your topic. Your pilot study can help you explore and test your ideas and plans for your overall thesis project, whether or not you intend to use PNI for that phase of your work as well.
• Build your own PNI practice. If you are a consultant and would like to consider running PNI projects for your clients, this course can help you to develop your unique flavor of PNI.

PNI Practicum II: Larger-scale PNI

In this course you will:

• Choose a topic of common interest to your group, family, community, or organization
• Select and adapt a story form with story-eliciting and story-interpreting questions
• Conduct a series of individual and group interviews and story-sharing sessions
• Build an online survey using NarraFirma
• Promote your online survey through a series of invitations to participate
• Gather 100+ stories from 20+ participants
• Annotate your data using qualitative analysis techniques
• Explore quantitative patterns (graphs and statistical results) using NarraFirma
• Prepare a set of observations, interpretations, and ideas based on the patterns you found
• Prepare your stories for use in sensemaking
• Facilitate a series of sensemaking sessions in which people make sense of the topic by working with the stories, patterns, observations, interpretations, and ideas you prepared
• Complete your project by returning the stories to the community and/or writing a project report

Download

Requirements

This course requires a cohort of at least 7 students, at least one of whom is comfortable facilitating group interactions. You will need to find a time and place to meet and to share working spaces and documents (online or in physical space).

The course requires a time investment (per student) of 6-8 hours per week (including class time) for 21 weeks. If you take the course with another student, or if you find a collaborator in your course cohort, you might be able to save some time by working together on a shared project.

In your course project, you will gather at least 100 stories and use them to support group sensemaking. You can start the course without a specific project in mind, but you will need to find at least 20 project participants who are willing and able to participate in the project at any of three levels: taking a ten-minute survey, participating in an hour-long interview or story-sharing session, or working with stories and patterns in a 2-3 hour sensemaking workshop.

This course strongly suggests the use of NarraFirma, my free and open source web application for doing PNI projects. You can install NarraFirma as a plugin on any WordPress site. (Or if you're a tech nerd, you can install it using Node.js.)

Meetings

This course relies on weekly 2-hour online calls that alternate between project progress meetings (in which you share what happened in your project, talk about your plans, and get feedback) and sandbox meetings (in which you participate in group exercises and discuss facilitation techniques).

Why take this course?

This course is for you if you want to:

• Deepen your explorations. If you're frustrated with surface-level survey research, this course can help you dive deep into group dynamics in story sharing and sensemaking.
• Broaden your explorations. If you're frustrated with narrow-range ethnographic research, this course can help you draw upon a greater diversity of experiences and perspectives.
• Open the door to stories. If you're tired of asking people for their opinions, and you're intrigued by the idea of inviting people to explore their experiences, this course can help you master the subtle art of story listening.
• Open the door to participation. If you're frustrated with extractive research, this course can help you learn how to work with motivated co-researchers at every level of participation, from sharing a two-minute story to co-creating a vision for the future.
• Take your PNI practice to the next level. If you are already familiar with the smaller-scale style of PNI, this course can help you level up to bigger and more ambitious projects.

More details

This is the presentation you'll use as you begin the course.

And here is the course syllabus.

I'd like to say a big thank you to Augusto Cuginotti, who helped me put together these explanatory videos.

What is PNI, and where does it come from?

Participatory Narrative Inquiry - that's PNI - is a marriage of two things. One is Narrative Inquiry, which is an academic field where researchers go out, talk to people, gather their stories (in interviews, usually), and then take them back to their researcher lairs and do stuff with them, and then they write reports and books and things, and the original people never get to see their stories again. Which is fine! That sort of research has been done for a very long time, and it's very useful. So that's half of it.

The other half is what's called Participatory Action Research, or just Action Research, in which groups of people come together to make positive change to make things better. Those two things are married in Participatory Narrative Inquiry.

When I started thinking of switching from animals to people [I was once an ethologist], I discovered Action Research and said, that's the only way to work with people. Because when you work with people, you can't just study them, because if you study them you change them. And so if you're changing people, you might as well change them in a good way, and you might as well work with them to figure out what they should be doing.

So I got very excited about that. And I read a lot about narratology and narrative inquiry and narrative analysis and all that. And then it just became obvious to me that these things needed each other. Then, over the course of many years, working with a lot of different collaborators, this work just formed itself.

Why pay attention to stories?

[The reason] why anyone should be interested in stories is that it's one of the most fascinating and useful aspects of human social behavior. We negotiate meaning with each other, and we communicate with each other, using stories. We recount our experiences, and we make sense of what's been going on, and we account for our experiences. It's used for accountability. Since I was very interested in social behavior [in my prior work in ethology], this became fascinating to me.

If you want to help people do things together and be social together, cooperate, get along with each other, pursue common goals, this is one of the things you need to know about, because it is one of the ways in which human society works. And everyone is involved in it. There's almost no one on this planet who doesn't ever tell a story. It's deep down in our social DNA as a species. So it's really worth paying attention to, because you can get a lot out of working with it.

What is PNI good for?

I've worked on a lot of projects having to do with - in organizations, say, you have retention, employee satisfaction, you have customer satisfaction, you have working together, teamwork, collaboration, how are we getting along with - cultural issues within the organizations. And then in communities, you have conflicts, you have - just people getting along. You have decision making, people trying to come to some kind of consensus on what we should do next, listening to each other, trying to find a way forward past obstacles. And then there are larger levels having to do with, like, in our country, what do we want to do? What do our citizens want? How do we make our government responsive to its citizens? How do we get people not just filling in forms with their preferences, but actually participating in finding new solutions? So any kind of thing in which that's going on: that's what people are using this for.

What situations benefit from PNI?

One of the reasons that we tell stories to each other and that we listen to each other's stories is that they are a negotiation device. So we use them to sort of come to terms with each other and get along and live together, right? So any situation in which people need to work things out together is a good situation to use story work for. So in those situations, people need to talk about what they believe, what they value, what they don't value, what matters to them, what doesn't matter to them, what their feelings are, what frightens them, what they have hopes for. And there are so many different situations in families and groups - work groups - communities and organizations where people need to work out those things. And of course people can talk. There's all kinds of conversational techniques. And stories is one of them. Trading stories, talking through stories, examining stories, playing with stories is one of the ways that you can do that.

Why pay attention to story listening?

Because we have become so accustomed to seeing that stories are movies and TV and books and newspapers and news programs, we've kind of forgotten the importance of listening and how much can be done by listening. How much you can learn. And when people are telling stories back and forth, that exchange is much more fruitful than just the telling. And so when you pay attention to the listening, you actually reap benefits because you're counterbalancing a lack. You're filling a hole that affects every community, every family, every organization. That kind of brings back something that we still need. And that's why I think paying attention to story listening is really useful.

What are some aha moments in PNI?

So there's kind of three categories of aha moments that I see people have in projects. And I'm sure there's more, but these are three that come to mind.

• One is the curtain is lifted. So people think they understand a topic or an issue. Then they go through the stories and work with the stories, and they say, "Oh, it's not what we thought. It's this thing, this other thing that we weren't paying attention to. And now we understand what's really happening." It's like the curtain has opened, and we can see reality better. Something has been removed.
• The second one I can think of is like a Tardis. It's bigger on the inside than the outside. And in fact, actually, the Tardis from Doctor Who is actually a motif that has occurred many many times throughout old folk tales. And this idea of entering into something that is bigger than you thought it was goes back thousands of years. But anyway, this reaction, or this moment, is where you think you understand an issue or a topic, but once you get into it, and you're working with the stories and with people's actual experiences and their feelings about them, you discover that there's so much more to it than you realized. And then you understand it at a deeper level.
• And then the third aha moment that I've often seen is similar to the dream where you suddenly find a new room in your house, and that room is beautiful, and it has all these other doorways in it that lead to more rooms, and it's exciting. And when that happens in projects, it's that people say, "Oh, this isn't impossible. There's these other options we hadn't considered. What if we tried this? What if we made an experiment with this?" You know, "This might work." And then they get new inspiration to try new things. And often that happens when their original idea is, "Why should we even bother? We already know everything about this." And so they learn new things and they say, "Oh, wow, let's try this." So the energy that comes from that is kind of the most important part.

What is the PNI Practicum about?

Note: This video is no longer perfectly accurate because I am no longer facilitating these courses, at least not by default. However, it still gives you an idea of what happens in the courses.

The PNI Practicum is an online course where there's a cohort of people who are going through it together, and there's a lot of discussion and peer learning and peer support. But the most important thing about it is that everyone does a project. Sometimes people will collaborate on a project, sometimes people do their own project, but everybody through the course of the course is doing a real PNI project. It's not theory. It's not - sit here and we'll show you how to do it. It's - you're doing it.

Now we do show you how to do it; we have - there's a theory aspect, in which you're reading stuff that I've written, in which we [you] talk about things. There's a sort of participatory aspect in which we [you] go through some of the workshop techniques and you're a participant and I'm [you are] facilitating. But to me, the most important part of it is that then you go out and you do that yourself, and then you come back and we [you] talk about what happened. You ask questions, and we [you] all talk about your choices and things like that.

So by the end of the course, you have finished your first real project, and you've made your mistakes in a nice, safe place where you can talk about everything. And we've [you've] talked about ways to recover from the different kinds of mistakes. And everybody makes mistakes doing this. You need to do that so you can learn how to do it. But you can then benefit from them and learn from them by working with the whole group together.

Who would benefit from the PNI Practicum?

The people, I think, who would benefit most from doing the PNI Practicum course are the people who have looked into PNI, have read a little bit about it - maybe they've read a lot about it - but they haven't done it yet. Or they haven't done it very much yet. And they're kind of holding back. They're kind of hesitating over the threshold because they're saying I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure how to really get this under my belt, be capable and feel confident in proposing projects and going ahead with things. And the idea is that we get you over that threshold. We get you through your first experience so that afterward, if someone says to you, "Oh, here's this project we could do," or you see a need for a project, you can say, "Oh, I know how to do that. we can do that."