We suggest that literacy narratives can be an important part of a curriculum designed to encourage students to understand themselves as developing learners and students. We know that there is great potential for literacy narratives—for narrativizing—when invited within a scaffolded curriculum of collaborative narrative inquiry. We place literacy narratives in the service of documenting learning—that is, within a pedagogical scaffolding designed to lead students through a series of moves that feature inquiry and discovery (about literacy). As such, the literacy narrative that emerges as most important is the final reflective narrative: the one we have spent all semester preparing students to write. That act of deferral creates an opportunity to put the literacy narrative (LN) assignment to different earlier use as a means for creating an ongoing, experiential literacy-learning narrative that will be realized as a reflective narrative: one we call the experiential-learning documentary (ELD).

We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground our process of discovery via LiteracyCorps Michigan, our ongoing, long-term research project. We offer this methodology as a research practice that can bring new understandings of how literacy sponsorship operates.

Documentary movie making is not academic writing. Nor is it traditional academic research. However, I have found it to be a remarkable vehicle for teaching both of these things...each semester I am amazed and humbled by the creativity and sincerity that my students bring to their work.