Narrative Inquiry In A Multicultural Landscape Microform Multicultural Teaching And Learning

The heart of this study is a detailed narrative account of a teacher in an inner-city school. For two years, the author collaborated with an immigrant teacher from the Caribbean, studying her practice from three perspectives: place—the community and school landscape; temporality—the history of the school and current programs; and interaction—the teacher's relationship with the school, parents, and students. Current ways of examining multicultural issues focus on the analysis of broad factors affecting large groups of people. In the process, the individual is subsumed within catagories and the subtle nuances of experiences are lost. The narrative approach outlined in the book offers a new perspective on multiculturalism and research into multicultural education, one the author terms narrative multiculturalism. Narrative multiculturalism begins with experience as it is shaped by the contexts in which people live and work. It is also shaped by broader societal and global forces. In this approach, multiculturalism is viewed as a fluid process, continually evolving, changing, and transforming. Narrative multiculturalism develops an in-depth understanding of individual experiences and thereby creates an alternate perspective on multiculturalism.

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

This book presents a narrative inquiry into the cross-cultural educational experiences of a family living in Hong Kong and Toronto, Canada. At heart a go-and-return story, Lau reflects on the difficulties of adjusting to the different practices of teaching and learning in two places with their own distinctive cultures. Ever more prescient now amid the current social and political upheavals in Hong Kong and around the world, the book considers the profound impacts such transitions have on families. By delving into the challenges of living, working, and learning across cultures, he reflects upon the deep-rooted values in both family and school landscapes to gain new insights about educational and cultural practices in Hong Kong and Toronto.

In the final chapter of this volume, the authors refer to the “pedagogical vantage points offered by narrative inquiry”, an apt comment that encapsulates the volume’s purpose and its spirit. As an increasing number of people throughout the world – and from a broad range of disciplines – are turning to narrative as a research methodology, this volume is timely in its focus on the learning and teaching of this approach. The contributors to the volume, all narrative scholars themselves, write about the creative and challenging pedagogical activities that they use in order to enable others to learn about and do narrative research. The volume will be of particular interest to those teaching narrative research methodologies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in the social sciences, medical sciences and the humanities. The contributions from Hong Kong, Israel, Europe and North America, all reflect critically on the rich complexities of using and teaching narrative in those contexts and attend closely to the diverse constituencies of their learning communities.

Narrative and Experience in Multicultural Education explores the untapped potential that narrative and experiential approaches have for understanding multicultural issues in education. The research featured in the book reflects an exciting new way of thinking about human experience. The studies focus on the lives of students, teachers, parents, and communities, highlighting experiences seldom discussed in the literature. Most importantly, the work emphasizes the understanding of experience and transforming this understanding into social and educational significance.

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.

Based on a two-year narrative study with an inner-city school teacher, the work provides an alternative way of thinking about multicultural education, termed narrative multiculturalism.