Foreword

Abstract

This is the book many of us need and have been waiting for. Graduate studies are a transformative educational experience in teacher's lives. Exhausted teachers sitting down for an evening's master's level course after a day of teaching often say they are rejuvenated by the opportunity to reflect on their hectic days. Doctoral graduates often speak of their doctoral programs as intellectually life changing. In the idiom of this book, doctoral graduates feel they have retold a story of themselves as educators. But, inevitably, the real test begins. How to relive this retold story as many take up the role of teacher educator. Their students' journeys are altogether different than their own transformative journey through graduate school. Their students are under pressure to successfully take up the job of school teacher. Their landscape of teaching and learning is altogether unlike the professional development landscape of experienced teachers, and it is altogether unlike the teaching/learning landscape of university level graduate studies. As newly minted graduates with a new teacher education job at hand realize, what to do with one's retold story is a puzzle. They ask, “How can I use narrative inquiry in my teacher education classes? No one else is teaching it in my faculty and all the courses seem to be about content and teaching method.” Depending on circumstances, some add “What do I do about the new school policies that I really don't understand but which don't seem to fit what I'm thinking?” What seemed so transformative in graduate school now seems to present a mountainous hurdle. It is a hurdle in the sense that this is the moment to begin reliving the retold story.

Citation

Connelly, F.M. (2011), "Foreword", Kitchen, J., Ciuffetelli Parker, D. and Pushor, D. (Ed.) Narrative Inquiries into Curriculum Making in Teacher Education (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. xi-xvi. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3687(2011)00000130003