Moments of tension: resistance as expressions of narrative coherence in stories to live by

Abstract

Our narrative inquiry in this paper explores the experiences of children and ourselves as teacher researchers as we negotiated two city center school contexts, one, a year 3–4 classroom and the second, a year 5 classroom. We attended to moments of tension in each context in order to explore our research purposes. The first is to develop a perspective for understanding how children and teacher researchers experience one another in teaching/learning settings. A second purpose is to understand what happens in moments of tension where children's and teachers' stories to live by are seen to be resisting stories of school. We selected moments from our field notes where we identified tensions between children's and teacher researchers' stories to live by and the stories of school in which they were embedded. We develop an understanding of narrative coherence to explore these moments in both teacher researchers' and children's stories to live by on school landscapes.

Notes

* Corresponding author: Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development, 633 Education South, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6E 2G6, Canada. Email: [email protected]

In our view children and families do not live within the same professional knowledge landscape as teachers and principals. The professional knowledge landscape is a metaphorical way of conceptualizing the moral and epistemological context of schools as experienced by teachers and principals. Families, for the most part, are positioned off the school landscape and, when they enter the landscape do so under the hospitality of principals and teachers (Pushor, 2001). Families help shape the storied landscape for teachers as parents co‐construct, and live out a story, in which teachers are experts, providers of knowledge about their children, and implementers of curriculum and families are consumers and receivers of information. When we say children and families are present on school landscapes, we do not suggest they experience, or live within, the professional knowledge landscape in which teachers and principals live.

There are some researchers who focus on children's and families' stories of school, most notably, Paley (1979, 1992, 1995).

We use the narrative construction of identity, stories to live by, similar to that notion developed by Carr (1986), Crites (1971), and Bateson (1989).

City Heights is the name we gave to the city center school where this narrative inquiry unfolded. Located in a Canadian city, the community surrounding City Heights school was developed in the early 1900s, with some ongoing redevelopment since that time. The most recent neighborhood profile indicates that the number of single parent, transient, low income and unemployed families are a high proportion of the neighborhood. Property is described as dilapidated and poorly maintained. There is little green space, a high crime rate and high traffic noise and congestion. Statistics Canada (1996) reported that the ethnicity of the community is diverse, with high numbers of people of Chinese and Aboriginal backgrounds. Nearly one‐quarter of the community's adults are described as having less than a grade nine education.

Karen Keats Whelan was a teacher co‐researcher working alongside Jean and Janice as they learned from the stories of diverse children and families at City Heights school. Writing‐in‐progress from the inquiry explores children's stories of school, their experiences of border‐crossings between in‐ and out‐of‐classroom places, children's identity making, and an exploration of ethical issues in negotiating relational narrative inquiry alongside children and families.

Because of the multi‐age organization of the school, we refer to the children's year in school rather than a grade.

As part of the negotiation of this inquiry alongside the children and families involved, pseudonyms were chosen for the children, families and school to protect their identities.

We are indebted to Vera Caine, a nurse researcher who works in Aboriginal communities in northern Canada and who pointed out that members of Aboriginal communities are often seen as resisting health practices imposed on them by white southerners. However, as Caine points out, the members of the community see themselves as trying to hang on to practices which sustain their cultural, personal and social narratives. The tensions are the result of the meeting of diverse cultural, social, and personal stories to live by.

Britzman and Pitt (1996) in retelling Anna Freud's narrative of a governess with a difficult student note that ‘continuity turns back on itself when the same teacher cannot extend the pedagogical relationship beyond its structure of repetition’ (p. 121). While we do not rely on psychoanalytic theory but rather on theories of experience, we too see our work as situated in ‘the seemingly paradoxical assumption that learning how one learns from the lives, histories, cultures, and dilemmas of others involves a close study of one's own conditions of learning’ (p. 119). Thus in order to understand the moment between Jean and Corina we need to understand something of both Jean's and Corina's narratives of experience.

Greenville school, another city center school located in the same Canadian city as City Heights, is nestled on the edges of the downtown core. City and school district documents describe the neighborhood and children and families of Greenville school as similar to City Heights. Located in a former ‘industrial’ area of the city, the Greenville neighborhood is described as poor, with both small family homes and low‐rental accommodation. Major traffic routes mark its boundaries and, although the neighborhood is described as ethnically diverse, the school population is described as 40% Aboriginal with an ethnic mix of Portuguese, Asian and other groups.

We do not mean to imply we were not attentive to the mandated provincial curriculum. Rather we made our starting point the children's life experiences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marilyn Huber *

* Corresponding author: Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development, 633 Education South, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6E 2G6, Canada. Email: [email protected]