Narrative Inquiries Into Curriculum Making In Teacher Education

Explores how individuals' identity and personal practical knowledge are being formed, shifted or interrupted through moments in teacher education.

Focusing on school as place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school, this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives.

In a climate of increasing emphasis on testing, measurable outcomes, competition and efficiency, the real lives of children and their teachers are often neglected or are too messy and intricate to legislate and quantify. As such, curricula are designed without including the very people that compose the identities of schools. Here Clandinin takes issue with this tendency, bringing together a collection of narratives from seven writers who spent a year in an urban school, exploring the experiences and contributions of children, families, teachers and administrators. These stories show us an alternative way of attending to what counts in schools, shifting away from the school as a business model towards an idea of schools as places to engage citizenship and to attend to the wholeness of people’s lives. Articulating the complex ethical dilemmas and issues that face people and schools every day, this fascinating study puts school life under the microscope raises new questions about who and what education is for.

Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making, addresses issues in curriculum and instruction, such as the lack of Black teachers, minority representation, and mentorship. The book arose from a serial interpretation of five published narrative inquiries that pinpointed complexities lived in a teacher knowledge community at T.P. Yaeger Middle School, a campus located in the fourth largest urban center in America. The inquiry initially resulted in a documentary-style presentation at an educational conference using performance narrative inquiry as an arts-based method to recount the research. In Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making, the process of researchers turned actors is unraveled by looking at the lived experiences and identifying the embodied knowledge of teachers in different content areas including Physical Education, Music, Teaching English as a Second Language, Mathematics, and Reading. The authors use parallel stories, counter stories, story constellations, musical narrative inquiry, performance narrative inquiry and other narrative means of sense-making as they examine how they may relate to those stories. Ethical research dilemmas, including the how and why behind each author’s choice to burrow into difficult topics such as race, gender and conflict resolution are revealed. By unpacking the hidden curriculum, examining value creation and by revealing isolated relational experiences of participants and researchers, Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making instantiates and outlines how truth and knowledge may be formed in educational settings through intertwining narrative inquiry, teacher knowledge and aesthetic ways of knowing.

Collaboration, Narrative, and Inquiry that Honor the Complexity of Teacher Education presents a narrative exploration of three teacher educators' collaborative and transnational inquiry into their practices. Through carefully selected narratives, the authors describe how they enacted a practice-based approach in their teacher education courses. The authors present challenges and complexities they encountered as teacher educators in trying to prepare preservice teacher candidates for the realities of the classroom.

Illustrates interim narrative field texts of identity as teacher educator stories and demonstrates how researchers utilize common places of temporality, sociality, and place in analyzing narratives. This title describes conceptualizations of narrative research processes, bringing forward narrative tools and methods of layering narratives.

Ripples into Lives: Being Attentive to Our Participation Alongside Children and Youth

What role does narrative play in building teachers' knowledge? In this timely volume, foremost scholars in the field of education not only open, but they deepen the conversation about the uses of narrative in the construction of teachers' knowledge.