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The interim research text shared at the beginning of this chapter was composed from field notes and other field texts created as we lived alongside Ji-Sook in her school and home places and through conversations with Ji-Sook and with Mrs. Han. The interim research text shows something of ways in which we recognized Ji-Sook's curriculum making as interwoven with her assessment making and identity making. By tracing Ji-Sook's assessment making in this interim research text, we see that before our coming to know Ji-Sook, she and her parents were already engaged in this process. At the centre of the family's assessment making was Ji-Sook's life, the life curriculum she was composing in Korea. As described in earlier chapters, Mr. and Mrs. Han were concerned about the competitive aspects of schooling in Korea. As Ji-Sook's parents, they wanted Ji-Sook to be deeply engaged in learning in school. In part, Mr. and Mrs. Han did not want Ji-Sook's life to be shaped by the dominant social and cultural plotlines of competition for the highest grades in schools in Korea. However, they did want her to attend university. Mr. and Mrs. Han had experienced long years of studying and testing as they competed for grades that would guarantee their acceptance into a Korean university. This was not what Mr. and Mrs. Han wanted for Ji-Sook's life, for her identity making. It was their dream of a “happier” childhood for Ji-Sook that shaped the family's immigration to Canada.

In this chapter, we inquire into our ever-unfolding experiences as teachers and with teacher research participants in order to explore the complexities of curriculum making in teacher education. In doing so, we lay the foundation for understanding narrative inquiry as both theory and method as such, frame our work in this volume. Curriculum making, a term introduced by Joseph Schwab, reflects the dynamic process of learning in which the teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu interact. Moreover, we think about the ways people make sense of themselves, identity-making, in the process of curriculum making. Through Derek’s experiences with Lee, a previous Grade five student, and Cindy’s work with Jesse, a research participant, we inquire into their curriculum making and identity-making. We argue that in schools, there are multiple curricula in the making, going beyond the formal notions of curriculum as grade-level standards or classroom objectives. In our inquiry process, we consider experiences in schools through Aoki’s understanding of curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum. In his writing, Aoki noted that the lived experience of curriculum in schools is much more complex and varied than the planned curriculum that is meant for a generalized audience; students and teachers bring their lives with them into particular contexts that indelibly shape the ways that curriculum is lived out. As well, we think about the ways experiences and places shape teachers and researchers and the ways we see the world.

In this chapter, I explore my autobiographical beginnings as a means of better understanding what brought me to the research I explore throughout this text. As Clandinin and Connelly as well as Clandinin and Caine suggested, examining our own stories along with the stories of our research participants is essential to understand the identity-making process. Autobiographical beginnings within narrative inquiry bring to the surface those factors influencing the researcher’s perspectives, thus locating the researcher within the inquiry as well as within a larger life context. The experience of metaphorically travelling back into the muskeg where I grew up in Northern Saskatchewan and then writing about it shaped the structure of my reflections on this inquiry into identity-making and curriculum making on the edges of community. In this chapter, I refer to the edges of community as a metaphorical space or spaces occupied by people positioned or constructed as marginalized from a dominant norm positioned or constructed as central to a community. I suggest a reframing of our understanding of spaces conventionally referred to as marginalized as well as contend that the notion of marginalization, itself, is a metaphor. In my inquiries into identity-making and curriculum making, I attend to the ways in which people’s positioning within communities is complex and shifting. As this chapter illustrates, our individual identities are multivalent and inextricably intertwined with who we are, who we were, and who we wish to become, whether we are researchers, teachers, or pre-service teachers.

This chapter disrupts the common notion that identity can be understood through the use of categories. Categorical terms like gay, straight, man, or woman often mask the complexity of curriculum making and identity-making. Curriculum making and identity-making are narrative terms used to understand the dynamic, relational, and on-going process of making meaning about people, things, contexts, and identity through experience. Identity making, understood narratively as the composition of stories to live by, allows us to image diverse communities, contexts, and experiences that uniquely shape the stories that people live and tell. Inquiring into the experiences of two research participants, I begin the chapter by thinking with Calle’s stories of experience to explore the limited and limiting categorical stories of identity. Then, I consider Jamie’s stories to live by, attending to the role of his contexts and communities in the composition of his stories to live by. In doing so, I seek to further map out the narrative geography of curriculum making and identity-making places and communities for individuals who compose diverse stories to live by. Building on previous research findings that contexts shape the composition of stories to live by as identity is negotiated through these dominant stories as an individual’s ontology, his/her story of the world and self in it, is constituted in part, by these dominant stories; here, I argue that contexts that allow for diverse stories to be told are those that attend to experience rather than clinging to familiar dominant stories.

In this chapter, I offer some insights into what I learned over the course of my inquiry into the living and learning that took place on the edges of community. I highlight the inconclusive nature of narrative inquiry as well as demonstrate my recognition that in any narrative inquiry we exit as we entered, in medias res, in the middle of things. Even though the inquiry ends, we continue to compose stories and to share those stories. Our understanding is only ever partial in the same way the stories we compose are incomplete, unfinished. In seeking a conclusion that is not a conclusion, then, I contend that experiences are complex and the stories we compose about those experiences are also complex. The insights and wonderings that emerged from the analysis of my own experiences as well as the experiences of my participants shaped themselves into the overlapping areas of identity-making, curriculum making, and community. In particular, I explored the stories people composed from the edges of community; those spaces conventionally described by the dominant narrative as marginalized. The participants discussed in this chapter demonstrated how profoundly they were each impacted by their positioning as marginalized. At the same time, their stories had a strong thread of self-definition that was insubordinate to that positioning. In varied ways, the participants refused to be defined by others or as other. Their experiences suggested that those spaces conventionally thought of as peripheral, the edges, were actually the defining features of communities.

In this chapter, we argue that through relational research experiences with colleagues and participants, researchers are in a shared process of curriculum making and identity-making. Through reflections on a key shared experience, we demonstrate that in the liminal space of our work together, we have begun to shape our community identity-making to tell a story of ourselves as researchers within that community. In our work together, we have come to understand the ways that research contexts shape the ways we engage in research and the identities we compose as researchers. We suggest that as researchers, we meet in borderlands to engage in relational inquiry with participants and our colleagues. Similarly to Anzaldua, we understand the borderlands as liminal spaces between our respective worlds of research where we come together to compose new stories about ourselves as researchers and the research in which we engage. We attend to the places of tension as they emerge as opportunities to understand more deeply ourselves as researchers and as co-participants in a relational research experience. In doing so, we attend also to our shared responsibilities to each other in an ongoing research relationship. In the borderlands, we meet to tell a new story about who we are and who we are becoming in all our complexity. In this examination of the research community, we have grown into together, we define parameters and processes that resonate with our individual identities as researchers as well as our communal identities within a supportive research community.

The purpose of the paper is to report on a qualitative research illustrating how equal opportunity ideals as part of a corporate CSR identity project are practiced on the local level.

Investigating the practice of CSR identity making, an ethnographic fieldwork methodology relying on longitudinal participant observations and semi‐structured interviews has been applied.

The authors argue that the practice of equal opportunities should be understood as a process of local interpretation of generally formulated ideals. By viewing the content of CSR identity as a socially negotiated process, it is suggested that a dynamic approach to the concept is required. The practice of equal opportunity is a continuously negotiated process of identity making and of locally relating ideals to practice in the negotiation between different stakeholders.

The article is based on a single case study with a limited number of informants.

This paper has implications for managers who work with CSR initiatives and corporate identity. The authors suggest that policies should be developed in close interaction with the different organizational members. This is necessary in order to manage the mutual expectations. To reach the best results in terms of managing corporate identity, it is necessary to consider CSR as a participative process.

Earlier studies on CSR have described corporate identity in static terms, independent of the local practices and interpretations. By applying a process‐oriented theoretical perspective combined with an iterative data collection, new insights into the actual practice of CSR initiatives are provided.

Stories to live by, a narrative conception of identity, are multiple and diverse. As such, I argue that a narrative approach to research allows for complex understanding(s) of people’s lives and provokes meaning-making for participants and researchers. In this chapter, I think with the stories of Mr CEO, a research participant, to understand better the ways that his competing stories to live by are held in tension through his life experience. Mr CEO identified as African American, male, and gay, for lack of a better term. Moreover, Mr CEO’s experience growing up in a conservative African American Christian church shaped his identity-making and added complexity to his sense-making around his multiple stories to live by. I inquire into the ways Mr CEO restoried his stories to live by as they conflicted in his life experience. Mr CEO’s process of seeking narrative coherence among his many stories to live by allowed him to make sense of these dissonant stories. Similarly, it was difficult for Mr CEO to fit in with many of the familiar communities related to his dissonant stories of identity (church, gay, African American communities). As a result of his shifting stories, it became necessary for him to find new contexts and relationships that allowed for multiple and diverse plotlines. Mr CEO engaged in the process of community making as he sought to find relationships that acknowledged and valued his racial, religious, and sexual identity.

In this chapter, we think about shifting stories of research as our experience of relational methodology through narrative leads us to think differently about our work together – our research relationship and responsibility to one another as colleagues, as well as our participants. We inquire into the ways our relational methods of narrative inquiry have continued to compose shared, sustaining stories of research and research community, support our own curriculum making and identity-making experiences, and provoke our respective thinking in new ways. We revisit Aoki’s metaphor of planned and lived experiences to think about the ways that research is lived out in our lives and the complexities of sense-making about research and ourselves as researchers. Research-as-experience can be viewed as a lived curriculum of research, which interrupts the dominant narrative of research-as-plan and acts as a counterstory of research. Research-as-experience is not a static research plan that must be implemented but rather a course of lives within the context of research to be experienced. This perspective recognized that research shifts, just as the lives and identities of our participants shift. Our plans for our participants within our research cannot contain their shifting identities and must shift with them in order to honour their experience. Our work together helped us to understand that it is only through relationship with our research participants and each other that we could approach a deep understanding of their experiences and the narratives they shared about those experiences.