“We're all stories in the end”: on the narratives that (un)make us

Narratives, and the public discourses that they feed into, shape how we think about ourselves, the work we do and both shape and are reinforced through the institutions we are submerged in. Narratives allow us to construct our identity and find our place within our particular context (Bruner, 1996). In this sense, narratives are inextricable from power (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2011). Rather, narratives are imbued with the power relations from which they rise, who can tell a story, who can claim it, and how the story can be told. As De Fina and Georgakopoulou assert, narratives are often an exercise in power relations and serve to perpetuate social inequalities.

Narratives hold a special place in the discourse practices that shape ideologies (Jacobs, 2000). The public discourses that shape our social life are often fed by narratives about how this work is done and who does this work. These narratives are expected to conform to a certain motif, which effectively dictates which voices get heard more often or louder than other voices (Blommaert, 2005; Ehrenhaus, 1993). In education, the discourse around the work done in schools is often in contention with discourses around accountability, or resource allocation. The articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI) all touch upon this relationship between narratives, discourse and power, particularly within the context of the United States. This includes exploring how narratives shape the way we see ourselves as educators and as citizens (Hochman and Lamb), examining how these narratives impact the work happening inside the classroom (Sherry), and unpacking larger discourses around what knowledge is deemed critical to a course, how the content is selected and what this means in the larger context of high stakes testing and short course durations (Parker and Lo).

These public discourses, which play out in the public space, through the media, political rhetoric and policy making, directly affect the work that happens within the walls of the school. The narratives used often shape how we think of practice or how we construct our social roles. In her piece exploring nostalgia as a “limiting cultural force” (p. 132) on school librarians, teacher educators and school administrators, Jessica Hochman illustrates the ways in which public narratives about school librarians directly influence how the profession is regarded by both those who practice it and those with power to dismantle it. Using Boym's (2001) distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgias, Hochman's “School Library Nostalgias” analyses the ways in which the school librarian's role is misperceived by school leaders, often invisibilizing the work they do and falling into stereotypes about their contribution to curriculum, resources and instruction development in the school. This misperception, the repeating narrative of school librarians as belonging in the ossified collection of books that libraries get constructed as, allows the same school leaders a double gesture, “simultaneously professing love for school libraries of the past while eliminating current programs” (p. 132). We see here the intersection of these competing narratives and the exercise of power that is enacted around the role of librarians, the author claims,

… these memories ascend to the ideological realm of restorative nostalgia: by trying to make the past present, and representative of an entire professional field, the nostalgia of the administrators becomes a dangerous tool of those in power. (p. 140)

This struggle also impacts how teacher educators and librarians themselves perceive their profession, leading to demoralization among practitioners, especially in the context of cuts that put their livelihoods at risk. Therefore, Hochman advocates for using reflective nostalgia to combat the ossification of librarians’ roles and the demoralization of practitioners. Unlike restorative nostalgia, reflective nostalgia allows for “criticality [to] emerge as the nostalgic simultaneously occupies the present and the context of their memory” (p. 135). As opposed to being tied to a false memory, reflective nostalgia allows for the existence of a narrative that “does not perfectly align with hegemonic notions of the library, and thus makes space for actual libraries and librarians to exist” (pp. 141). In countering these hegemonic false notions of librarians and libraries, not only is educational reform and the rhetoric around library programmes potentially transformed, but so are the ways in which teacher educators, practitioners and librarians see the role of these educators in schools.

Moving from the library into the classroom, two of the authors in this issue explore the dynamics of narrative within the classroom space to elucidate the importance of who is the classroom and how the content matters. Sharon Lamb and Renee Randazzo, in their article entitled “From I to We: Sex Education as a Form of Civics Education in a Neoliberal Context”, look at a sexual education curriculum that aims at moving students from narratives of “I” to ones of “we.” That is, moving away from discourses of personal, individual responsibility to ones of collective, social responsibility for social change. The authors begin from the premise that the narratives currently prevalent in sexual health classes focus on individual choice and health prevention, driven in part by the prevalence of abstinence-only programmes in the United States. They posit that these narratives have “resulted in a self-centered ethic of sex in which the ethical treatment of sexual partners and goals of care and mutuality are forgotten” (p. 149). These hyper-individualistic discourses of choice and individual responsibility pervade the classroom context and “prepare students for an individual project of choice-making to benefit their own health” (p. 149), because there is little space to discuss how young people treat each other or their responsibilities to each other in sexual relationships.

Lamb and Randazzo connect these narratives in the curriculum to larger discourses of neoliberalism and meritocracy in education, drawing our attention to the ways in which our work in classrooms is intimately tied to sociopolitical and historical discourses. This is particularly important when thinking about this work in the reproduction of social inequalities, as the authors remind us that the illusion of free choice that is central to a neoliberal discourse results in a “blindness to the social conditions in which actors act and agents make choices” (p. 150). That blindness makes it challenging to hold conversations about how inequalities are directly implicated in the choices available to individuals and therefore in their behaviour. Instead, this discourse of choice and personal responsibility lays the blame on the individual for their circumstances, and it is people who are oppressed who are asked to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and subscribe to this discourse. Lamb and Randazzo's proposal is a curriculum that seeks to extend:

sex education into social studies with its lessons on consent, media objectification, and pornography, but does so through applied philosophy, asking students to consider their behavior towards others, and, more importantly, to consider what is ethical sexual behavior in a society with multiple injustices. (p. 151)

By analysing the “ethical dialogues” that emerged during whole class discussions of consent, coercion and media portrayals of women's bodies, the authors argue that discourses of collective responsibility are resisted by students who grow up immersed in what the authors term neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility and choice. However, rather than being discouraged by this resistance to demonstrate a more compassionate “ethics of care,” the authors instead point to the importance of creating spaces in the classroom to disrupt the pervasive narratives of “individualized ideal of self-protection” in order to “plant the seeds for future activism” (p. 164), using the curriculum as a tool to address the marginalization of certain groups in society.

Staying within the microcosm of the classroom, Michael Sherry's article, “Bringing Disciplinarity to Dialogic Discussions: Imaginative Entry and Disciplinary Discourse in a Ninth-grade History Classroom”, takes us into the heart of how narratives operate in the classroom. Rather than focusing on the messaging of narratives, this article takes a closer look at how the narratives themselves operate within the dynamics of whole-class discussions. He takes as a point of departure that these discussions promote higher order thinking in students by asking them to think about the “why” or the value and consequences of certain decisions. The co-construction of narratives is important inside the classroom as students can engage in dialogic interactions. This particular article goes deeper to consider whether the discipline or subject matter of the classroom in which this happens has any bearing on these interactions, or on their discursive features.

Sherry focuses on the whole-class discussion of a 9th grade history classroom, using narrative and interactional frames to analyse how students engage in these discussions. The author demonstrates how the narratives co-told by the teacher and his students “discursively construct students' relationships to past events” (p. 168), so that the content of the class and how it gets taken up shape classroom narratives. Moreover, the relationships within the class also matter, reminding us that who is involved can be as important as the content. In exploring how narratives shape the readers’ relationship to the text, Sherry connects these relationships to how students participation is affected in whole class discussions and how the dialogic quality of that participation is either hindered or enabled by this interaction. “(W)hat is being discussed might affect who can participate” (p. 189). Content and narrator are intricately tied together in the co-construction of narratives in the classroom.

Our fourth article continues to look at the content of classroom discussions, but this time by looking directly at the conundrum of selecting the content that is taught, and how to navigate the many different priorities pulling on teachers as they select which content to emphasize. Specifically set in the context of AP classrooms, which are characterized by a high volume of content to cover in a short span of time and evaluated through high-stakes testing, Walter Parker and Jane Lo ask whether “meaningful learning” can occur in this kind of environment in their article titled “Content Selection in Advanced Courses: Toward Meaningful Learning Amid the ‘Hundred Million Things’.”

Like other AP courses, and perhaps “advanced” courses more generally, students in this course face a daunting topical load, which can encourage a kind of teaching and learning best described as “test-prep” or “coverage.” The superficial learning that too often results belies, we believe, the meaning of “rigorous” and “advanced” that are ascribed to these courses. (p. 197)

This test-prep coverage responds to the tensions of larger school pressures, particularly resource allocation and accountability. However, as Parker and Lo point out, this often means that the learning that can happen in these classrooms is superficial. If meaningful learning is to take place, then what knowledge and skills would best contribute to achieving this goal? The authors work with teachers and administrators to develop a project-based curriculum which prioritizes certain themes in the mandated AP curriculum, without excluding the content that is required. Rather than seeing it as an either/or situation, the authors choose to emphasize certain themes that cut across the curriculum in order to still cover a large volume of content while promoting a deep learning of the subject for students.

This work occurs without being divorced from the concrete circumstances that govern much of the decision-making that can occur in schools. The authors remind us that curriculum does not happen separate from “institutional realities, of intellectual fashions, of custom and law, of school schedules,” but rather that “curriculum is embedded in them” (p. 203). This tension lies at the heart of much of the work in curriculum studies. What knowledge matters? How do our decisions around this question perpetuate or challenge historical and sociopolitical inequalities? The connection between the work we do in classrooms, with each other, and the larger discourses and ideologies is clearly laid out by Parker and Lo and they theorize how content gets selected and organized in this particular AP course.

Parker and Lo call for the continued engagement of critical curriculum scholars in proposing ways to navigate this tension, and continue the challenging task of selecting content that does not preserve the status quo but that confronts it. Their work brings us back to the need of developing alternative narratives around the work we do. Rather than falling into simple dichotomies that polarize and preclude certain ends, to instead embrace the living with and in the tensions of the dilemmas inherent in the practical intersection of educational practice.

The willingness to live with/in these tensions, to find the pedagogical in the conflict and not necessarily in the resolution, lands us in the “messy” work of living in contradictions. It seems counterintuitive to the neat work of social science and to the outcome-driven narratives that seem to surround education in schools in the present day. Yet, it is this messiness that affords us a new spectrum of opportunities. In the dirty work of choosing, prioritizing and by extension excluding and obscuring, the re-making and re-framing of these narratives can occur. In engaging with these dilemmas, in kneading and reworking these apparent dichotomies, we can shape the stories that make and unmake us.