Narrative multiculturalism

This is the first of three papers based on a 20-month study of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom in a downtown community school in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of the study was to examine teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and to document successful strategies in working with immigrant and minority students. The three papers detail the process by which this focus on classroom life led to a critique of the literature and to a new way to think about multicultural teaching and learning that I call 'narrative multiculturalism'. In this paper, I explore the place of multiculturalism in education and describe several limitations of the traditional ways of examining the issue. I also outline the understanding with which I began the study and describe the nature of my inquiry. I use my autobiographical experiences of multiculturalism and multicultural research to reflect on the literature of multicultural education. The narrative of my relationship with a teacher participant provides a conceptualization of the field and suggests the nature of narrative multiculturalism.     

Professional development in person: identity and the construction of teaching within a high school science department

This is a narrative inquiry into the role of professional development in the construction of teaching practice by an exemplary urban high school science teacher. I collected data during 3 years of ethnographic participant observation in Marie Gonzalez’s classroom. Marie told stories about her experiences in ten years of professional development focused on inquiry science teaching. I use a social practice theory lens to analyze my own stories as well as Marie’s. I make the case that science teaching is best understood as mediated by socially-constructed identities rather than as the end-product of knowledge and beliefs. The cognitive paradigm for understanding teachers’ professional learning fails to consistently produce transformations of teaching practice. In order to design professional development with science teachers that is generative of new knowledge, and is self-sustaining, we must understand how to build knowledge of how to problematize identities and consciously use social practice theory.     

Will that be one mentor or two? A cross‐sectional study of women's mentoring during college

Three teacher educators formed a new teacher support group for three novices whom we had prepared, in order to help them deal with challenges and uncertainties of the first year of teaching. Using narrative inquiry, we collected the novice teachers' stories by composing field texts, using audiotaped interview data, classroom observations, bi-monthly journal entries, and participant personal narratives as data sources. Common patterns across the data stories included induction into the isolation of teaching, interest in NOT abandoning university teacher preparation, and the need to learn from mentoring. The implications provide discussion of the educative role of teacher support groups in learning to teach, and university involvement in learning to teach during the induction years.     

A case study of a career in education that began with “Teach for America”

In this article I share the results of a seven‐year case study of an educator who began his career without formal preservice teacher education, as a participant in Teach for America. Steven (a pseudonym) began teaching mathematics in an urban middle school, later teaching social studies to English language learners, and is currently a principal of an urban charter school. Using a narrative/biographical research method, I have documented how Steven combined his personal resources, the confidence he gained from participating in Teach for America, and, because he began taking professional coursework in his second year of teaching, his emerging understanding of the foundations of teaching and learning (i.e. what he learned at the university) to form the educator he has become. His growth in understanding the culture of his students is a particularly compelling part of his story. Implications for contemporary teacher education are discussed, including the role of multicultural education courses and why customized teacher education programs should become more commonplace.     

‘Being’ a critical multicultural pedagogue in the art education classroom

Art educators continuously struggle to understand what multiculturalism ‘looks like’ in the art classroom. This has resulted in multicultural art education becoming superficial, in which art teachers guide students through art projects like creating African masks, Native American dream catchers, Aboriginal totems, and sand paintings, all without communicating the context of the art. This type of multiculturalism essentializes cultures, and builds Western, myopic narratives about groups of people, specifically about their ‘Art’. Critical multiculturalism is a power-focused upgrade of multiculturalism that calls for a critique of power and demands recognition that racism and other discriminations are enmeshed in the fabric of our social order. Teaching through a critical multiculturalism framework helps teachers dismantle Western, normalized narratives and produce counter-hegemonic curriculum that contextualizes culture and reveals its fluidity. In this article, the author shares a teacher action research study in which she describes what critical multiculturalism looks like in her art education classroom. The study focuses on ‘being’ a critically multicultural educator versus ‘doing’ critical multiculturalism. Such a position counters the idea that critical multiculturalism is a thing to complete, but instead is an ongoing process that rests on specific ways of thinking and considering the classroom, curriculum, and students.     

Using Learning Stories to Capture “Gifted” and “Hard Worker” Mindsets within a NYC Specialized High School for the Sciences

All science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators working in urban public school systems are expected to provide opportunities for students to develop foundational scientific literacy skills in mathematics and science learning. However, the demands on STEM educators teaching the “gifted” or “high-performing” students attending STEM-focused schools are much higher. Educators are expected to motivate, nurture, and propel the intrinsic or earned abilities these students possess. This article shares teaching- and learning-informed stories of a STEM educator (the author) and her students attending New York City Specialized High School for the Sciences. The goal is to document the complexities surrounding the notion of a gifted mindset: first from the author's own experiences as a female scientist and person of color and second from the narratives of the students. Teaching and learning within a prestigious public school for the sciences comes with many narratives of challenge and triumph. The learning stories of empowered students reveal that they desire opportunities in the STEM classroom for meaningful learning. Students who want to take ownership in their learning will find a way to appropriate meaningful learning, even in restrictive classrooms. Learning stories, as a theoretical framework and narrative assessment tool, are particularly useful in contextualizing the multi-dimensional aspects of being a STEM professional in education.     

Talking and Teaching Through a Positional Lens: Recognizing what and who we privilege in our practice

This article describes a year‐long professional development project that brought together a group of high school English teachers around multicultural literature they would be teaching to their students. The teachers all taught together in a culturally and economically diverse high school context in the USA. One objective of the project was to enable the teacher participants to explore their discourse patterns around the literature to discern their own subject positions with regard to one another and to the texts studied. In addition, the teachers together analyzed their own classroom discourse to determine how those subject positions carried over into their teaching, how they essentially taught who they were. Discussions of multicultural literature and teachers’ talk around that literature, accompanied by close interrogation of classroom practice, enabled the teachers to discern what (and who) they privileged in their teaching practice. These realizations led one of the two teachers highlighted to readily change her pedagogy and curriculum to better support the learning and empowerment of all students.     

Conceptualizing narrative authority: Implications for teacher education

In this paper I explore an alternative to the dominant authority of positivism in teacher education research and curricula through the conceptualization of narrative authority. Narrative authority is rooted in the personal practical knowledge of teacher education students, university teachers and classroom teachers as they interact within the contexts of teacher education. I begin by describing Dewey's conception of experience as individually continuous and socially interactive. I then discuss two ways in which knowledge is constructed from experience and describe how each Ivalues a different kind of authority. 1 then focus on the educative qualities of experience and show how narrative knowledge expressed through mundane and sacred stories can become taken-for-granted or be reconstructed through experience. Next, I describe how we can think of ourselves as authoring our lives through our narrative authority. I then consider the institutional narratives of teacher education in which sacred stories of apprenticeship, technical rationalism, and inquiry are embedded. I conclude by discussing some of the implications acknowledging narrative authority has for reshaping teacher education.     

Just like my nanny: troubling teacher’s social identities in the classroom

Teacher-researcher narrative accounts are essential and insightful for the science education field, yet they are few and far-between. In this forum, I engage in dialogue with Nicole Grimes’s auto-ethnographic narrative on the affordances her femme-Carribean identity allowed for some students to engage more deeply in science. While I agree with and applaud Grimes’s reflection on how her perceived social identity had positive effects on some students’ engagement in science, I trouble the notion of such a social identity being framed solely as an asset to student learning by examining the power dynamics inherent in the enacted nanny-child relationship. I also propose the need for deeper analyses on how a teacher’s social identity can impact students’ learning experiences in the science classroom by looking at how the boundaries of the science classroom are redefined and what additional resources are recruited that can foster deeper engagement.     

A critical discourse analysis of Gisela's family story: a construal of deportation,illegal immigrants,and literacy

In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this story, and she wrote and illustrated this with the help of her father, student peers, and me. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa's constructs of nepantla and nepantlera, narrative analysis, and systemic functional linguistics to show how Gisela's construed this story to create a powerful and creative narrative that disrupted autonomous forms of literacy along with the excluding and damaging discourses circulating about immigrants in our community.     

优秀高中英语教师实践性知识养成的叙事探究

本研究采用叙事探究的方法,借助活动理论剖析了一名优秀高中英语教师的教学故事,挖掘其实践性知识的生成过程。本研究发现教师实践性知识的发展是一个由内部矛盾驱动的拓展学习过程,充满着各种矛盾、张力的较量。基于矛盾的反思性实践和教师强烈的主动发展意识是教师实践性知识发展的重要影响因素,但是教师对学生的爱是教师实践性知识发展的根源。本研究表明教师教育应触及教师的自我经历及其教学环境的核心问题。     

Narrative study of a high school English teacher’s beliefs about teaching students identified as having a disability

A qualitative study probing the connection between a high school English teacher’s lived experience and beliefs about teaching students identified as having a disability using interview story method was undertaken. Struggles with family quickly emerged as a dominant storyline in the participant’s discussion of her beliefs about teaching such students. The teacher’s value of diversity in students, regardless of disability/ability status, evolved from family relations. The narrative also illuminates the importance of persistence and compromise in preserving and developing relationships that extend to colleagues and students. Lessons learned from gathering the narrative are also discussed.     

“Oh,I have a story”: narrative as a teacher's classroom model

This paper examines the teaching practices of one American Indian teacher in a high school literature class. It explores the teacher's use of narrative as an instructional strategy designed to convey abstract concepts through concrete experience. The narratives engage students in critical thinking and personal reflection, and provide them with the opportunity to make connections between social and historical contexts. In addition, the teacher uses stories to contrast multiple contexts with personal experiences, which reflects teaching strategies previously identified as those used by effective teachers. There is evidence that sharing ideas and concepts through story is an important way of encouraging social relations and helping students make connections between what they are learning in school and what they know of the world. Based on data analysis, this study presents a model of the teacher's use of narrative as a strategy to pose critical questions, frame a context for discussion, encourage students to reflect on personal perspectives, and introduce ideas and concepts. The model provides a visual representation of the teacher's use of narrative as a way of clarifying course content, contextualizing meaning, and reinforcing understanding.     

“The music is why I teach”: Intuitive strategies of successful teachers in culturally diverse learning environments

This study explored the classroom learning environments and instructional strategies of four teachers in culturally diverse classrooms. All teachers were deemed successful by their school colleagues, including administrators and instructional specialists, at meeting the needs of their culturally diverse students. The teachers in the study, who were teaching in four different regions of the U.S.A. and who represented different grade levels, taught in schools that contained richly diverse student populations. Using the constant comparative method of data analysis, I conducted a cross-case analysis of the teachers' learning environments. A primary focus of the research was the relationship between teachers' biographies and culturally sensitive classroom instruction. Three themes about culturally sensitive teaching emerged during data analysis: reshaping traditional school curriculum, rethinking the role of the teacher, and acquiring and using cultural sensitivity. Implications for preparing teachers for culturally diverse learning environments are discussed.     

Relationships between metaphors,beliefs, and actions in a context of science curriculum change

This study is an interpretive investigation of Sarah, a first-time teacher of middle- and high-school science who, because of high levels of disruption, was unable to establish and maintain environments favorable to learning. Sarah reflected on her roles as a teacher and identified facilitating learning, management, and assessment as salient, each being associated with defining metaphors and belief sets. Sarah's efforts to improve her teaching began with the construction of a new metaphor, the social director, for her role as manager. She developed coherence between the new metaphor and beliefs about constructivism, teaching, and learning. Sarah then managed her class in accordance with the social director metaphor and, although improvements were apparent, some students were uncooperative. Sarah then changed her metaphor for assessment from the teacher being a fair judge to the teacher looking through a window into a student's mind, an opportunity for students to show what is known. When this metaphor guided Sarah's assessment practices the learning environment improved appreciably. Although the development of new metaphors was a significant part of the process of reconceptualizing her roles as a science teacher, Sarah could not have improved the quality of teaching and learning without substantial assistance from her colleagues and school administrators.     

Living the stories we tell: The sociopolitical context of enacting teaching stories

This article draws from two separate classroom-based studies of early career teachers that yielded overlapping findings about the diminished opportunities teachers and teacher educators have to construct sophisticated stories about the complexities of classroom life and the ongoing process of learning to teach. The teachers' stories represent the intersection of research, policy, and practice, illuminating contradictions between teachers' beliefs about teaching and what they were able to enact in their classrooms. These findings may be leveraged to support teacher educators to support teachers to create coherent narrative identities that help them creatively respond to problems of practice and contextual constraints.     

Understanding narrative relations in teacher education

The use of stories in teacher education is ubiquitous; yet, the question regarding how stories help teachers make sense of their professional lives is more complex than it first appears. The authors draw from Adriana Cavarero's understanding of narrative relations as the political site where one's unique singularity is revealed in the desire to have one's story told. They compare her insights to Judith Butler's resignification of injurious speech, examining both positions as they apply to a beginning teacher's efforts to become the professional she admires. It is suggested to teacher educators that they use stories from practice to foreground the tension between a teacher's life and her life-story. By understanding the irresolvable tension of desire to have one's story told, a teacher has a better chance of recognising her own vulnerability and that of her students, and of teaching at the starting place of ethics.     

Learning to teach: enhancing pre‐service teachers’ awareness of the complexity of teaching–learning processes

Abstract

Interest in story in teaching has been linked to teacher research (Carter, 1993; Elbaz, 1991), to teacher education (Connelly &; Clandinin, 1994), to curriculum (Britz‐man, 1989; Gudmundsdottir, 1991c), and to school change (Giltin, 1990). I wish to argue here for a link between story and one form of teacher reflection, for portfolio construction, unlike more conventional forms of teacher development, encourages teachers to tell the story of their classrooms and to frame that story in particular ways. I wish to argue here for a view that constructing a portfolio shifts the ownership of learning to the portfolio‐maker and that in this constructing, we can trace a teacher's developing understanding of pedagogy. Specifically, my aim is to illustrate the narrative dimensions of a self‐generated portfolio question — its interpretations, the reflections upon its meaning, and its transformations of pedagogical understanding — as this text becomes pedagogy and pedagogy becomes text. This interpretive process is illustrated through a case study of Ellen Nicol, a secondary English as a Second Language teacher, in her graduate teacher education year and her first 2 years of classroom teaching. Ellen's pedagogical text, her question, is reinterpreted with major changes each time she comes to understand more completely the richness and complexity of her classroom. Each new transformation and reinterpretation serve as guide for selection of materials, for selection of pedagogy, and for assessment of success. Each new collection of pedagogical information serves as impetus for possible reframing and transformation of the text.     

Preparing teachers for multicultural classrooms

This article examines issues involved in teaching culturally diverse students and questions current practice in multicultural teacher education. An alternative approach to preparing teachers for multicultural classrooms, illustrated by the Teachers for Alaska program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, focuses prospective teachers on (a) attending to multicultural classroom and community contexts, (b) designing instruction to make connections between academic subject matter and diverse students' backgrounds, and (c) learning how to learn from students, communities, and practical experience. The authors argue that radical departures from traditional teacher education are possible and that breaks from standard practice are both desirable and effective in preparing teachers for multicultural classrooms.     

A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: Lives in China

In a series of three papers, I examine the identity development of three Chinese women teachers as they moved back and forth between Eastern and Western cultures and languages amid the rapidly changing events of the last four decades. I use a river metaphor to explore three phases in the cross-cultural lives of these women: in the first paper, their lives in China amid multiple cultural movements; in the second, their lives in Canada; and in the third their lives in the North American academy. This lifebased narrative inquiry, situated between non-fiction, fiction and academic discourses, opens up possibilities for establishing a link between cross-cultural lives and identities, cross-cultural teacher education and curriculum studies in multicultural contexts. In this first paper, I explore the three teachers' lives in China before, during and after the Cultural Revolution. I tell stories of changes for each participant as cultural upheavals were experienced in their homes and schooling. I pay special attention to the relationship between living such disruptive lives, telling such lives, and developing an inquiry-oriented way of thinking about and writing about such lives related to identity development and its impact upon cross-cultural curriculum making and multicultural education.