Janice Huber

Attending to changing landscapes: Shaping the interwoven identities of teachers and teacher educators †

Teachers, in Canada and elsewhere, live and work on school landscapes being shifted by globalization, immigration, demographics, economic disparities and environmental changes. Within those landscapes teachers find themselves struggling to compose lives that allow them to live with respect and dignity in relation with children, youth and families. In places in Canada, increasing numbers of teachers are leaving after only a few years of teaching. In this paper we take up questions about the stories teachers tell of their leaving and about what we can learn about our work as teacher educators from listening to, and inquiring into, their stories. Considering the inter-relatedness of our lives as teacher educators with teachers, we also inquire into our shifting landscapes as teacher educators. We discuss possible spaces we might collaboratively shape with teachers as they, and we, attempt to sustain our stories to live by on these shifting landscapes.

Negotiating Narrative Inquiries: Living in a Tension-Filled Midst

ABSTRACT The authors explore the place of tension in understanding narrative inquiry as a relational research methodology. Drawing on a narrative inquiry into childrens, teachers’, and families’ experiences in schools shaped by achievement testing practices that flow from accountability policies, the authors show how attending to tensions is central to the relational aspects of composing field texts as well as writing interim and final research texts. Through a fictionalized interim research text, the authors make visible the centrality of relational narrative ethics as we live in the midst of tensions. Finally, the authors offer a starting point for considering the dangers of counterstories as we work with participants and attend to tensions.

Narrative Inquiry: Toward Understanding Life’s Artistry

Abstract As we entered into Eisner and Powell’s exploration of the artistic and aesthetic qualities of the work of researchers, we were drawn toward deeper questions of our own lives as narrative inquirers. In particular, we thought about a metaphorical three-dimensional narrative inquiry space as a way to explore the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of experience. By returning to field texts of our recent work alongside Darlene, a mother we met on the landscape of an inner-city school context, we show how she was engaged in an artistic and aesthetic composition of her life experience. Our account also reveals how, as narrative inquirers engaged with Darlene, we, too, were composing artistic and aesthetic stories to live by.

Narrative Inquiry as Pedagogy in Education: The Extraordinary Potential of Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving Stories of Experience

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or—knowingly or unknowingly—in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaningless. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives. (Okri, 1997, as cited in King, 2003, p. 153)

A marginal story as a place of possibility: negotiating self on the professional knowledge landscape

Abstract Drawing on a two-year study focusing on teacher identity and marginalization within diverse school landscapes, we explore the educative and miseducative qualities of response as told through one teacher’s story. By reconstructing and making meaning of this story through the conceptual framework of the “professional knowledge landscape” [Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1995). Teachers ’ professional knowledge landscapes . New York: Teachers College Press], we consider how this teacher’s identity—which we understand narratively as “story to live by”—shapes, and is shaped, within the in- and out-of-classroom places on her school landscape. Through a final retelling of this narrative, we pay close attention to the response which emerged from each of these fundamentally different places and we examine this teacher’s negotiation of her story to live by in relation to a school story of inclusion. This focus enables us to name borders of power, judgment and silence, and “bordercrossings” [Anzaldua, G. (Ed.). (1990). Making face, making soul=Haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by feminists of color . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books], which are shaped within “public homeplaces” [Belenky, M., Bond, L., & Weinstock, J. (1997). A tradition that has no name: Nurturing the development of people, families, and communities . New York: BasicBooks]. We believe that this story is a place of possibility—possibility for understanding the central role that presence to our narrative histories plays in enabling us to live and to sustain stories that run counter to those being scripted for us on school landscapes.

Ethical Dilemmas in Relational Narrative Inquiry With Children

In the fall of a school year, the authors began work in an elementary inner-city school. Positioned as teacher researchers, they spent the year in a 3/4 classroom. Their inquiry intentions were to more fully understand the experiences of children, families, and teachers of diverse backgrounds as they engaged with each other in the school. They are experienced researchers who have worked with adults, teachers, teacher educators, and principals as coresearchers in other relational narrative inquiries. The authors imagined negotiating similar coresearcher relationships with children. However, as they worked to negotiate coresearcher relationships with children, they encountered new relational inquiry complexities. In this article, the authors explore these complexities and make explicit four tensions they experienced in the study. They suggest a need for negotiating an ethic of relational narrative inquiry alongside children as coresearchers.

Living in Tension: Negotiating a Curriculum of Lives on the Professional Knowledge Landscape

Drawing on a view of childrens and teachers’ identities as stories to live by, the authors use one field text, taken from a year-long narrative inquiry, to show how childrens and teachers’ stories to live by interact with milieu and subject matter in classroom curriculum making. Tensions around negotiating a curriculum of lives are identified as childrens stories bump against teachers’ stories. Three childrens stories to live by are represented through a set of images in found poetry. We return to the curriculum-making moment with wonders about each childs evolving stories to live by in relation with the particular subject matter. We outline four methodological dilemmas and ethical dilemmas encountered in studying multiple participants’ experiences nested within social, cultural and institutional narratives.

Beyond the Still Pond: Community as growing edges

Our concern in this paper is community. Buber (1965) and Greene (1988, 1994, 1995) describe community as places always in the making, social contexts continuously shaped and re-shaped by the activities and interactions of diverse people. Laying their understandings of community alongside a story shared in a research conversation with a group of principal co-researchers, we explore and ask questions of what might be otherwise on school landscapes if the stories of community shaping these social spaces were more open … fluid … embracing of diversity, contradiction, and complexity. As our work in this paper illustrates, to ignore the stagnancy of school contexts shaped by stories of community as fixed, smooth or harmonious, is to ignore the marginalization that can silence the diversity of lives meeting there.

Becoming a narrative inquirer: Learning to attend within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space

Our teaching of narrative inquiry, shaped by a conceptualization of narrative inquiry grounded in a Deweyan theory of experience, works from a view of experience as embodied, always in motion, and shaped and reshaped by continuous interaction among personal, social, institutional and cultural environments. Given this experiential grounding, narrative inquiry is much more than telling or analyzing stories. Our focus is on learning to think narratively, that is, on learning to think with stories. Learning to think with stories highlights the relational, multiperspectival processes in which participants and narrative inquirers inquire into their lived and told stories attentive to the dimensions of temporality, sociality and place and with a focus on retelling and reliving lived and told stories in more thoughtful and responsive ways in the future. Through a series of storied moments, we show ways in which we intentionally create small responsive communities of sustained conversation enabling students to tell aspects of their lives through engaging in diverse narrative inquiry activities. We then illuminate the transformational power of response as lives meet within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space and each teller is supported in retelling his/her stories in more attentive ways. As students learn to attend to their experiences in narrative ways each teller awakens to new ways of knowing and becoming a narrative inquirer.

Places of Curriculum Making

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.