Composing Diverse Identities: Narrative Inquiries into the Interwoven Lives of Children and Teachers (Teachers, Teaching and Learning)

In a climate of increasing emphasis on testing and measurable outcomes, the lives of children and their teachers are often too difficult to legislate and quantify. Clandinin brings together narratives from writers exploring these experiences and moving towards the idea of schools as a place to engage citizenship. Book Cover......Page 1 Half-Title......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgements......Page 8 Introduction......Page 10 1 A narrative understanding of lives in schools......Page 13 2 Working alongside children, teachers, parents, and administrators in relational narrative inquiry......Page 26 3 Children's stories to live by: Teachers' stories of children......Page 49 4 Children's fictionalized stories to live by......Page 70 5 Children's and teachers' stories to live by in a school story of character education......Page 88 6 Living alongside children shapes an administrator's stories to live by......Page 104 7 Shifting stories to live by: Interweaving the personal and professional in teachers' lives......Page 121 8 Living in tension: Negotiating a curriculum of lives......Page 144 9 Composing stories to live by: Interrupting the story of school......Page 158 10 Imagining a counterstory attentive to lives......Page 171 Afterword......Page 185 Notes......Page 191 References......Page 193 Index......Page 200 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. In this important new book seven authors bring together stories and questions about the lives of children, families, teachers and administrators. Lives are seen up close, in all their particularity, and explored in terms of the contexts that shape the experiences of students and staff. These stories provide an alternative view of what counts in schools, with a shift away from viewing the school as a business model towards an idea of schools as places to engage citizenship