Janice Huber

Renowned scholar and founder of the practice of narrative inquiry, D. Jean Clandinin, and her coauthors provide researchers with the theoretical underpinnings and processes for conducting narrative inquiry with children and youth. Exploring the unique ability of narratives to elucidate the worldview of research subjects, the authors highlight the unique steps and issues of working with these special populations. The authors address key ethical issues of anonymity and confidentiality, the relational issues of co-composing field and research texts with subjects, and working within the familial contexts of children and youth; include numerous examples from the authors’ studies and others – many from indigenous communities-- to show narrative inquiry in action; should be invaluable to researchers in education, family relations, child development, and children’s health and services.

Renowned scholar and founder of the practice of narrative inquiry, D. Jean Clandinin, and her coauthors provide researchers with the theoretical underpinnings and processes for conducting narrative inquiry with children and youth. Exploring the unique ability of narratives to elucidate the worldview of research subjects, the authors highlight the unique steps and issues of working with these special populations. The authors address key ethical issues of anonymity and confidentiality, the relational issues of co-composing field and research texts with subjects, and working within the familial contexts of children and youth; include numerous examples from the authors’ studies and others – many from indigenous communities-- to show narrative inquiry in action; should be invaluable to researchers in education, family relations, child development, and children’s health and services.

This book documents a radical shift in thinking from focusing on the school as the place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school. The narrative inquiry framing this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives. It draws on a research project involving multiperspectival narrative inquiries spanning four research sites and traces the tensions experienced by children, families and teachers in multiple curriculum making sites and some of the profound identity making and assessment making implications that become visible. Its attention to the relational in narrative inquiry is focused on tensions that shape lives and, as well, the unfolding of narrative inquiries. This informative book has a wide reaching audience of educational researchers, teacher educators, research methodologists, particularly those interested in narrative inquiry, curriculum scholars, graduate students, university faculty, teachers, administrators and parents alike.

This book documents a radical shift in thinking from focusing on the school as the place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school. The narrative inquiry framing this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives. It draws on a research project involving multiperspectival narrative inquiries spanning four research sites and traces the tensions experienced by children, families and teachers in multiple curriculum making sites and some of the profound identity making and assessment making implications that become visible. Its attention to the relational in narrative inquiry is focused on tensions that shape lives and, as well, the unfolding of narrative inquiries. This informative book has a wide reaching audience of educational researchers, teacher educators, research methodologists, particularly those interested in narrative inquiry, curriculum scholars, graduate students, university faculty, teachers, administrators and parents alike.

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 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.