Jean Clandinin, 2004

KEYNOTE 2004 – University of Manitoba

Narrative Understandings of Lives in School

Jean Clandinin

Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development

University of Alberta

In the paper I share with you today I sketch a kind of narrative overview of the research program I have been involved with over the past 20 years or so. In so doing I compose a narrative thread that connects what has come before with current work I am engaged in with a group of graduate students, teachers, children, parents and administrators in one school. I begin with my work in a school in Toronto, Bay Street School2, in 1981 and end with another school in Edmonton, Ravine Elementary, in 2004. I pick up on moments and tensions that connect these diverse projects with what I am trying to understand about lives in school. My purpose is to show the need for more multilayered, multivocalic research in curriculum studies and teacher education that are possible and necessary within a narrative view of curriculum. However, as a kind of prologue, I give a very personal account of how I saw the landscape, the research context in curriculum studies, in which I began.

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