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Learning by doing," it is often said, is the best way to master a new skill. For my students in research methods courses, though they are reluctant to appear indifferent to the history and theory of narrative, it is their own emerging practice that interests them the most. They want to learn how to "do" narrative, often assuming there are well-known and well-defined procedures that will form the backbone of the course. Instead, I propose that narrative research represents a group of problems not only in composing texts but in reading them. Thus, the syllabus includes books that demonstrate possibilities for narrative, work by scholars aware of how storytelling forms operate in the disciplines.In this, my approach differs from the kinds of "reading" that Amia Lieblich and her colleagues have fruitfully explored in their pedagogically oriented Narrative Research (1998). They focus on how primary sourcesfor example, the results of a life history interview-can be read in order to construct convincing research accounts. As a complement to such efforts, 199

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