Composing Diverse Identities: Narrative Inquiries into the Interwoven Lives of Children and Teachers

by Clandinin; D. Jean

• ISBN13: 9780415397476
• ISBN10: 0415397472
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-05-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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#xE2;#xAC;"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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction	1	(161)
1 A narrative understanding of lives in schools	4	(13)
2 Working alongside children, teachers, parents, and administrators in relational narrative inquiry	17	(23)
3 Children's stories to live by: teachers' stories of children	40	(21)
4 Children's fictionalized stories to live by	61	(18)
5 Children's and teachers' stories to live by in a school story of character education	79	(16)
6 Living alongside children shapes an administrator's stories to live by	95	(17)
7 Shifting stories to live by: interweaving the personal and professional in teachers' lives	112	(23)
8 Living in tension: negotiating a curriculum of lives	135	(14)
9 Composing stories to live by: interrupting the story of school	149	(13)
10 Imagining a counterstory attentive to lives	162	(14)
Afterword: re-narrating and indwelling	176	(6)
STEFINEE PINNEGAR
Notes	182	(2)
References	184	(7)
Index	191