Search

Inquiring into Trudy, Shaun, and Janice's experiences alongside Anishinabe Elder Dr. Mary Isabelle Young's living "pimatisiwin" (walking in a good way) and "pimosayta" (learning to walk together) with us, we show how her living in these relationally ethical ways grounded our creating and offering an "Assessment as Pimosayta" course in two Canadian teacher education programs. The authors built from Mary's teaching to include the experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and worldviews of Indigenous community members and scholars. These beginnings shaped openings for attentiveness to relationally ethical assessment through Indigenous, holistic, narrative, and relational ways of knowing, being, doing, and relating. Learning to dwell in enduring tensionality has been central, as this tensionality has emerged in Trudy, Shaun, and Janice's attempts to create with the teachers the "trans-systemic" process and spaces imagined by Battiste. Trudy, Shaun, and Janice see that the enduring tensionality experienced in this middle space opens potential to begin to live the "respectful, ethical, relational, and … ecological" relationships described by Donald and the resultant "ethical relationality" that needs to ground these relationships.

A student, and two professors collectively explored the unique nature of their graduate course entitled "Narrative Pedagogy as Social Justice." All of the authors experienced personal transformation through relationally engaging in difficult dialogue. They now wonder, how to create classroom spaces where dialog about difficult topics can begin--a space where students and faculty can engage in inquiry? Their research focused on this unique graduate course, in which professors and students came together to inquire into difficult issues that they as a class were facing and the ways they relationally created and sustained inquiry over the duration of the course. Through this exploration, they seek to remake the academy by hearing diverse voices and creating classroom counterspaces where untold stories are heard and dialogue begins. Now that the course has ended, the three authors seek to characterize and understand more of the lived process of narrative pedagogy as a social justice practice--the heart of their course content. In coauthoring this article, they sat together again at a proverbial table, each bringing their own experiences and inquiring into the dialogue alongside one another. As they engaged in this reflective inquiry, they attended to ways narrative inquiry guided their pedagogy. Seeking to make visible core narrative inquiry pedagogical processes to contribute to conversations of humanizing the academy by dismantling practices of inequity. This article shows a continuous effort to nurture classroom counterspaces and to make visible how these spaces, places that call forth both experience and responsibilities, can come into being.

Narrative inquiry is both phenomenon and methodology for understanding experience. In this article, we further develop our understandings of narrative inquiry as a practice of social justice. In particular, we explore ways in which social justice issues can be re-framed and re-imagined, with attention to consequent action. Drawing on work alongside Kevlar, a youth who left school early, we explore our understandings. Being grounded in pragmatism and emphasizing relational understanding of experience situate narrative inquiry and call us to think narratively with stories. This allows for movement away from dominant narratives and toward openings to imagine otherwise in dynamic and interactive ways.

Diversity, equity, and justice are vital focuses in teacher education programs and research. Yet, studies show that as children and families interact with schools their lives are often ignored, silenced, or used to define them as deficit. This paper inquires into the interactions between early career teachers, children, and families. Using a semi-structured interview protocol, we explored the personal and professional situations 20 early career teachers described as shaping the knowledge they draw on in their interactions with families. Thinking narratively with the stories shared by one teacher, we explore the potential of familial and school curriculum-making worlds in teacher education and ways these understandings may open spaces and conversations that strengthen the interactions between early career teachers and families.

As they wrote this article attentive to the focus of this volume of "Review of Research in Education" on "extraordinary pedagogies for working within school settings serving nondominant students" (C. Faltis & J. Abedi, 2011, personal communication), the authors held close understandings of ways in which narrative inquiry embodies potential for shaping extraordinary pedagogy in education. They see this potential of narrative inquiry to remake life in classrooms, schools, and beyond as centrally situated in Clandinin and Connelly's (1998) understanding that it is education that lives at the core of narrative inquiry "and not merely the telling of stories." This understanding of narrative inquiry, that is, as attending to and acting on experience by co-inquiring with people who interact in and with classrooms, schools, or in other contexts into living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories of experience, lives at the heart of this article. The authors stay attentive to this understanding in each of the four upcoming parts: "The Transcendent Power of Story," "Turning Toward the Study of Narrative in Academia," "Diverse Methodological Understandings of Narrative in Education Research," and "Narrative Inquiry, Education Pedagogy, and the Composing of Lives." Their attentiveness to this central aspect of ways in which narrative inquiry opens possibilities for shifting stories, and therefore, lives, connects them with the knowing of many people whose thinking in relation with story, narrative, experience, and lives shapes their thinking and living as narrative inquirers. In this way, too, the article draws readers toward the voices of people who share a vision of the centrality of attending to lives, and the making and remaking of lives, as vitally important work in classrooms, schools, and communities. (Contains 11 notes.)

Our paper, and the inquiry from which it emerges, is situated in world-wide concern to increase the numbers of Aboriginal teachers in schools. In Canada, the population of Aboriginal young people is rapidly increasing. Yet, at the same time, the gap between the attainment of a university credential in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations is widening. Set against this background and these urgencies, our paper focuses on an experience resonating across the lives of six Aboriginal teachers in Canada of being excluded or silenced by dominant historical, institutional, and social narratives positioning them as not "real" teachers. As we inquire into these experiences in each teacher's life, we pay attention to the responsibilities revealed in each teacher's story. These responsibilities become visible by attending to intergenerational narrative reverberations, reverberations that maintain the historic narrative of colonization imposed on Aboriginal people and, reverberations poised to counter, to interrupt this dominant narrative, seeking to heal, to support and to sustain current and future generations of Aboriginal teachers as they compose their lives inside and outside of schools and universities. (Contains 8 notes.)

The authors explore the place of tension in understanding narrative inquiry as a relational research methodology. Drawing on a narrative inquiry into children's, 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. (Contains 4 notes.)

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. (Contains 2 notes.)

Describes teachers' experiences in a narrative research group. Meeting regularly to discuss their work as educators and researchers, they examined the story of a disagreement between a teacher and parent. Retelling the story within the supportive research group allowed the teacher to reach new insights about what she shared with the parent and why the conflict had been so difficult. (SM)

Discusses how storytelling influences us and those around us, focusing on one teacher's story. After situating the inquiry within a narrative conceptualization of teacher identity and the professional contexts in which teachers work, the paper examines the teacher's story and examines ways in which response was continuously negotiated and lived out in the school. (SM)