Restorying lived lives in educational research: Storyboarding as a creative space for scholarly thinking in narrative analysis

AbstractTraditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of filmproduction. In this article, we focus on its use as a creative space for analysis in educational research.Specifically, we make visible our learnings, as social science researchers, about storyboarding as animaginative, tangible, and reflexive space for narrative inquirers to work with the complexity of restorying livedlives in educational research. We draw on Sibonelo’s reflections on using the storyboard in his doctoraldissertation and offer our subsequent dialogues on his reflections as the data for this article. Our learningsindicate that storyboarding opens-up researcher subjectivity in the restorying process. In engaging criticalfriends, it serves as a space for the mediation of multiple perspectives and meanings of participants’ lived livesand is an imaginative space in which to filter creatively large amounts of field texts. We thus suggest thatstoryboarding enhances verisimilitude in the restorying process. Keywords: critical friend, narrative analysis, narrative inquiry, productive ambiguity, storyboarding,verisimilitude, visual research