Crime fiction and educational inquiry: reading, writing, and intertextual play

Writing is a method of discovery, a way of finding out about yourself and your world. When we view writing as a method, we experience ‘language-in-use,’ how we ‘word the world’ into existence… And then we ‘reword’ the world, erase the computer screen, check the thesaurus, move a paragraph, again and again. This ‘worded world’ never accurately, precisely, completely captures the studied world, yet we persist in trying. Writing as a method of inquiry honors and encourages the trying, recognizing it as emblematic of the significance of language (Laurel Richardson, 2001, p. 35).In this essay I briefly describe, justify, and perform an approach to reading and writing educational inquiry that foregrounds the generativity of bringing literary and other fictions into intertextual ‘play’ with the academic and professional texts that constitute the so-called ‘literature’ of educational research. I focus in particular on the popular genre of the crime story, in order to demonstrate that strategically positioned readings of crime fiction can inform our understandings of storytelling practices in educational inquiry