Cheryl J. Craig

Opportunities and challenges in the development of teachers’ knowledge: the development of narrative authority through knowledge communities

Abstract This work examines generative approaches to teacher professional development that pay attention to how personal, interpersonal, contextual and situational factors influence teacher knowledge developments over time. Using examples from our research programs, we show how critical it is to intentionally account for how teachers filter their professional development experiences through their personal practical knowledge expressed in community. By featuring Pat (the pre-service case) and Liz (the in-service case), we illustrate how teachers develop their narrative authority in knowledge communities and show why knowledge communities are critical to the sustained development of narrative authority. We argue that attending to these critical matters creates opportunities for understanding that can lead to confirmation of, refinement in, or transformation of present practices.

The Relationships Between and Among Teachers' Narrative Knowledge, Communities of Knowing, and School Reform: A Case of “The Monkey's Paw”

Abstract Centering on the monkey’s paw metaphor, this narrative inquiry links teachers’ pedagogical practices with their professional-development experiences associated with a national reform movement that, in this situation, acted in a top-down manner. The longitudinal study illuminates the short- and long-term influence that the state-directed national reform initiative had on the story of a diverse, U.S. middle school and on the stories its teachers subsequently lived and told. The work particularly focuses on the relationships between and among teachers’ knowledge developments, their knowledge communities, and their attitudes toward school reform.

Uncovering Cover Stories: Tensions and Entailments in the Development of Teacher Knowledge.

Abstract Building on the research of Crites in theology and Clandinin and Connelly in education, the authors map out three variations of cover stories lived and told by pre-service and in-service teachers in order to clarify their scholarship and inform the research of others. We examine how these narratives are formed around canonical stories that teachers publicly claim to know (or show) and actually do know (but not as favored interpretations), and personally authorized stories that teachers publicly claim not to know (or show) but that they personally do know (as favored interpretations). We illustrate how this necessarily deceptive double storying may give rise to miseducative situations. We then offer our conceptualizations of knowledge communities and teachers’ narrative authority as ways to create spaces for all stories to be reflectively heard and examined, and to address inherent challenges that arise when narrative knowledge goes unacknowledged because of pervasive sacred stories embedded in institutional prescriptions, stories of school, and competing philosophical positions.

Why Is Dissemination So Difficult? The Nature of Teacher Knowledge and the Spread of Curriculum Reform

Anchored in the narrative inquiry tradition, this article examines commonly held beliefs about curriculum dissemination from the perspective of a teacher whose campus participated in a major school reform initiative. Through the presentation of a constellation of fine-grained stories revolving around the teacher’s curriculum making as an art educator, the integral role that narrative played in the elucidation of her knowledge, most specifically her emerging understanding of curriculum development and dissemination, comes to light. At the same time, the underside of technical rationalism, the taken-for-granted worldview that dominates Western society and drives educational policy, is exposed and held open to scrutiny.

Research in the Midst of Organized School Reform: Versions of Teacher Community in Tension:

Arising from a longitudinal study examining the influence of school reform on teachers’ knowledge communities and communities of knowing, this narrative inquiry traces the development of a workshop approach to reading and writing, principally through the introduction of a staff developer, to the school’s professional knowledge landscape and to the literacy teachers’ curriculum making over a 3-year period. While some of the school administrators perceived the trainer as building professional learning community through sharing knowledge, skills, and dispositions, the majority of the teachers, and some of the other administrators, appeared to view the staff developer, herself a teacher, as being in collusion with the principal (and vice versa) and as crossing the line concerning what teachers and their communities of knowing are able to tolerate. Different stories produced different visions of community, and a number of issues related to teacher development emerged. Disconnects among theory, practice, and policy surfaced.

The Contested Classroom Space: A Decade of Lived Educational Policy in Texas Schools

In this article, examples excerpted from research studies conducted in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest city in the United States, are used to demonstrate how the discretionary classroom space where teachers and students actively live curriculum—guided, though, not controlled, by official documents and administrative oversight—has become increasingly disputed. Through meta-level narrative analysis, excerpts from several accounts that elucidate different manifestations of the contested classroom space in multiple school contexts are woven together. In the process, the ways that teachers, principals, parents, professors, consultants, district personnel, the media, researchers, and students contributed to the contentious environment are explicated. Also, versions of curriculum and instruction that increased the contestation are named. As a result, changes that teachers and students lived in classrooms from 1997 to 2007, the decade when educational policy making in Texas served as the prototype for the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act, are characterized.

Research on the Boundaries: Narrative Inquiry in the Midst of Organized School Reform

ABSTRACT The author centers on narrative inquiry as a “multilayered and many stranded” form of qualitative research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. xvii), one that unfurls in the midst of a plethora of social phenomena and other research agendas (Conle, 1999). In the article, the narrative inquiry broadly relates to organized school reform in the years leading up to and immediately following the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002). The work depicts the narrative inquirer as part of a human parade (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) situated on a continuum of time, place, the personal, and the social (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). The narrative inquirer, similar to all other researchers, is complicit not only in what stories become lived and relived but also in how stories become told and retold about experiences encountered and enacted in the field of education. In this particular instance, the author focuses on the bumping up places between narrative inquiry and other research and societal perspectives while discussing, from a methodological point of view, the interstices where teacher knowledge, school context, and organized reform meet.

“Butterfly Under a Pin”: An Emergent Teacher Image amid Mandated Curriculum Reform

ABSTRACT The author examines 1 experienced teachers image of teaching and how it was purposely changed—through external intervention and against the individuals will—from the view of teacher as curriculum maker to the view of teacher as curriculum implementer. Lauras account of the “butterfly under a pin” image, a version of the teacher-as-curriculum-implementer image discussed in the literature, vividly portrays the events that led up to the imposed transition and demonstrates how the press for accountability in U.S. schools appeared to supersede in importance other ethical and professional considerations. The findings of this research study form a sharp reminder of what is lost and gained in compulsory curriculum reform efforts—even welcomed ones.

The epistemic role of novel metaphors in teachers’ knowledge constructions of school reform

In this article, a parallel is drawn between Steven Hawking’s use of common and novel metaphors in his evolving explanation of the theory of the universe and the similar use of common and novel metaphors by educators in four school contexts attempting to illuminate their experiences of school reform storied and restoried over time. The epistemic role of novel metaphors is unpacked through examining the plotlines of the metaphors, the morals of the metaphors, the freedom of the metaphors and the teacher knowledge implications resident in the live metaphorical utterances. Through the use of self‐selected novel metaphors, both Hawking and the educators merged propositional and non‐propositional knowledge that was bound up in persons—and communicated across people—in deceptively simple, though infinitely complex, ways.In this article, a parallel is drawn between Steven Hawking’s use of common and novel metaphors in his evolving explanation of the theory of the universe and the similar use of common and novel metaphors by educators in four school contexts attempting to illuminate their experiences of school reform storied and restoried over time. The epistemic role of novel metaphors is unpacked through examining the plotlines of the metaphors, the morals of the metaphors, the freedom of the metaphors and the teacher knowledge implications resident in the live metaphorical utterances. Through the use of self‐selected novel metaphors, both Hawking and the educators merged propositional and non‐propositional knowledge that was bound up in persons—and communicated across people—in deceptively simple, though infinitely complex, ways.

Learning about reflection through exploring narrative inquiry

This article illustrates what can be learned about reflection through exploring narrative inquiry as a productive research method in the study of teachers’ experiences of school reform. By focusing on five qualities of narrative inquiry: (1) research in the midst; (2) research on the boundaries; (3) knowing through relationship; (4) narrative truth; and (5) following where the story leads, the paper illustrates how each dimension fruitfully contributed to my developing understandings of what teachers came to know in the context of organized school reform at T.P. Yaeger Middle School, the campus where I have conducted research for over a decade. In the final analysis, my discussion concerning the use of narrative inquiry to excavate teachers’ experiences of school reform and the connections between it and reflective practice demonstrates the never ending complexities of school landscapes, school reform efforts and educators’ lives lived in relationship and across time and place. It also shows how integral reflection is to continuity and change.