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

Abstract

Drawing on a view of children's and teachers’ identities as stories to live by, the authors use one field text, taken from a year-long narrative inquiry, to show how children's 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 children's stories bump against teachers’ stories. Three children's 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 child's 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.

Citation

Huber, J. and Clandinin, D.J. (2005), "Living in Tension: Negotiating a Curriculum of Lives on the Professional Knowledge Landscape", Brophy, J. and Pinnegar, S. (Ed.) Learning from Research on Teaching: Perspective, Methodology, and Representation (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 313-336. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3687(05)11011-6