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Lives in School
D. Jean Clandinin
Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development
Thank you for the honor of this award. It means a great deal to have my university
community honor me in this way. However, because Narrative Inquiry is relational
inquiry, engaged in with others, this award belongs not only to me but to many others.
Those others have been a wonderful group of graduate students, teachers, principals,
children and parents. My research began in my doctoral program with Michael Connelly
at the University of Toronto more than 20 years ago. Since that time many doctoral and
masters students have come to be part of the work. Together the graduate students,
Michael and I developed a language and way of thinking about schools and lives in
schools. I know that by naming a few of these graduate students, there are many I will
leave out but some people have been part of this research for so many years that I must
mention them. Former doctoral students Pam Steeves, Debbie Pushor, Hedy Bach, Merle
Kennedy, Joy Ruth Mickelson, Cheryl Craig, Margaret Olson and, most centrally, Annie
Davies, Chuck Rose, Karen Keats-Whelan and Janice Huber have shaped what we
understand about lives in schools in profound ways. As the University honors me with
this award I want to acknowledge that this award also honors them.
The research that I share tonight is about lives in schools. How we research lives in
schools depends upon how we, as researchers, see schools. For example, one approach to
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researching lives in schools is to see schools as physical places where the experiences of
children and teachers can be measured through tests. When researchers see lives in
schools in this way, researchers test and rank children; lives and experiences are known
by numbers.
Slide One: Photo of school
Slide Two: Photo flip up of test scores
Slide Three: Photo of school
Slide Four: Photo flip up of lists of test scores
Slide Five: Photo of school
Slide Six: Photo flip up of ranked list of schools
One way of attending to lives in school is to attend to them via achievement test scores,
whether children are meeting a bench mark, achieving at a level of excellence or not.
That approach is an important one.
But there are other ways to research lives in school, ways such as the way we engage in
research. In our approach researchers see schools as places where children’s and
teachers’, parents’ and principals’ lives are composed and lived out. In this approach we
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attend to children’s and teachers’ lives narratively...we see them as lives being composed
within particular institutional narratives.
Slide Seven: Photo of school
Slide Eight: Photo flip up of a teacher and a small group of children
The research I engage in is narrative research. I see schools narratively and the research
that I do attends closely to lives being composed and lived in schools. Paying close
attention to lives and how they are composed goes back to my early years of growing up
on a farm in central Alberta. My mother and father both paid close attention to the land
on which we lived and to the people who lived around us. I learned from them to attend
closely to lives being composed and lived out. Living and learning alongside two amazing
scientists, my husband and my son, I continued to learn to attend closely. While they
attend to such matters as the changing lipid content of milk and to genetic structures, we
all learned to watch closely, to attend to small changes, and to watch for patterns and
shifts in what we saw.
To set a backdrop for the research we do, I return to John Dewey’s metaphor that life is
education. Educators are interested in learning and teaching and how they take place; they
are interested in the leading out of different lives, the values, attitudes, beliefs, social
systems, institutions, and structures and how they are linked to learning and teaching.
Educational researchers are, first educators, and are interested in people. Educational
researchers, with their interest in people, are no different than anyone pursuing research in
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the social sciences. These are the sciences of people. People’s lives and how they are
composed and lived out are what is of interest.
But if our interest as researchers is experience--that is, lives and how they are lived-how
did so much of educational research become focused on the measurement of student
responses, on achievement tests or other measures? How did educational experience
come to be seen as something that could only be seen in this way?
We draw on the historian Ellen Lagemann’s book John Dewey’s Defeat: Studying
Education in the Research University 1890-1990 to situate our research with its focus on
studying experience narratively against this larger backdrop of educational research. The
book’s title itself is telling of how the idea of experience has been lost in educational
research. As Lagemann writes “one cannot understand a history of education in [North
America] during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike [ a
measurement psychologist] won and John Dewey [ an educational philosopher] lost”
(1989, p. 185)
Lagemann notes that in the early 1900’s, educational research emerged within a climate
of “increasingly common faith in the value of deriving generalizations from empirical
data” (1996, p. 5). Educational research studies tended to be fairly comprehensive,
censuslike investigations. What enabled such research were tests and statistical devices
that “allowed researchers to measure the achievement of students and the costs of
instruction and then, through comparative statistical analysis, to determine which
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practices were apparently most effective, least costly, and, therefore, most efficient”
(1996, p. 6). Such studies, with “a reverence for numbers,” were made possible by tests
and statistical devices. This approach to studying experience continues to appeal to
government agencies, policy makers and researchers as a way to engage in studying
schools.
But we began to wonder about other ways to study experience. Drawing on the narrative
research of philosophers such as Mark Johnson, of anthropologists such as Mary
Catherine Bateson, of literary theorists such as Carolyn Heilbrun, we began to imagine a
different plot line for educational research, a way to study experience through attending to
the lives of people who live in schools.
Narrative inquiry has become our way of understanding experience. With narrative as our
vantage point, we have a point of reference, a life and a ground to stand on for imagining
what experience is and for imagining how it might be studied and represented in
researchers’ texts. In our view, experience is the stories people live. People live stories,
tell stories and in the telling of these stories, reaffirm them, modify them, and create new
ones.
Not so long ago we began a new research study in order to come to understand
something of lives in school, particularly the lives of children and teachers who work
together in an inner city community. I want to tell a story fragment of one moment ..a
moment that lets us move backward and forward in time, inward to the felt emotions and
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outward to the social situation, even as the moment is situated in place. For us, these
movements inward and outward, backward and forward and situated in place are what we
mean by attending narratively to lives in school. It is what we mean by seeing lives in
school narratively.
As I said earlier, narrative inquiry is relational inquiry. That means that as a researcher, I
need to live in relation with people, children and teachers, in schools over an extended
period of time. I need to live alongside, attending closely to the lives being composed.
And so it was that I came to live alongside Lia, a young girl in this inner city classroom.
One September afternoon, during shared reading time in this Year 3/4 classroom, Lia
asked to read with me. She chose Mem Fox’s book entitled Whoever You Are, a book
she insisted we read together. We sat, curled up on the carpet in the cozy corner, reading
the book which told of children from many places in the world.
As Lia turned the pages of the brightly illustrated book, she read:
Little one,
Whoever you are,
wherever you are,
there are little ones
just like you
all over the world
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As we read on, the themes of skin color, life styles, schools, and lands were seen as
possible differences.
Their lives may be
different from yours,
and their words may be
very different from yours.
But inside,
their hearts are just like yours,
whoever they are, wherever they are,
all over the world.
She read that smiles, laughter, and hurts were similar. The refrain of difference became a
refrain of similarities where joys, love, pain and blood were the same.
Smiles are the same,
and hearts are the samewherever they are,
wherever you are,
wherever we are,
all over the world.
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Lia wanted me to read with her in preparation for sharing the book
with her classmates when they gathered at the peace candle to celebrate the day’s events.
She was animated as she looked at the pictures and read the words, the book clearly
marking something special for her. As we read together, Lia stopped from time to time to
tell me stories of coming to Canada from east Africa, of escaping the horrors of war and
bombings with her family to live in Canada.
In order to show you how we as narrative inquirers understand this moment in classroom
time, we need to understand the moment as situated in a place. The place is a classroom
in an inner city school in Edmonton. But the place shifts as Lia tells stories of her early
childhood in Africa and her family’s escape to Edmonton. The shared reading of the book
made a space for Lia to bring her early childhood place into the classroom. As we read
the book, slipping from the printed page to the memories she was storying, she moved us
inward and outward, drawing us into the book and into her memories of a bomb dropping
through the roof of her home, of a stealthy flight from Africa to Canada. We both moved
backward and forward in time as we thought about who we each were, about what she
had left behind and what she was creating in this new place. Because Lia had come to
know me over some time, she felt safe enough to tell her stories to me.
Moments such as these are what narrative inquirers see when they live alongside teachers
and children in schools. They see lives being composed and lived out within institutional
narratives of schools. Our research is about trying to understand these lives, about trying
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to make sense of these narratives of experience, the narratives of both teachers and
children and of researchers such as myself who come and live there.
But it is too simple to understand this moment without situating the moment of shared
reading in the classroom story that the two teacher-researchers, Karen Keats-Whelan and
Janice Huber, were creating in the classroom. Their knowledge of teaching, what we call
their personal practical knowledge, was expressed when they shared the book, Whoever
You Are, with the children in that Year 3-4 classroom on the first day of school, many
days before Lia read it with me. They used the book to create a space for children to
acknowledge their diversity, to acknowledge that diversity made each child unique and
special. Their knowledge of teaching was expressed as they created a carpeted cozy
corner for bringing children together. Their knowledge of teaching was expressed as they
lit a peace candle around which the children gathered to share special moments, to
celebrate who they were, to discuss tensions and disagreements and to create ways to
dialogue across difference to understanding.
They found the book and recognized its place in a classroom. They are teachers who
know the power of stories whether the stories are in books or in the lives of children.
Their personal practical knowledge comes from who they are as teachers living stories
with children in classrooms. We see their teacher knowledge as narrative embodied
knowledge, as storied life compositions. In our view of teacher knowledge it is important
to attend to each teachers’ narrative of experience, the knowledge they composed as they
grew up, attended school, studied at the university and so on. But teachers’ stories, their
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narratives of experience, are both personal - reflecting each person’s life history - and
social - reflecting the milieu, the contexts in which teachers live.
Because teachers’ stories are social, it is important to attend to the contexts in which
teachers work, the social context of schools. We understand these contexts as landscapes,
as having in and out of classroom places, as filled with secret, sacred, and cover stories.
These notions of personal practical knowledge and professional knowledge landscape are
narrative educational concepts. They are the ways that we understand teacher knowledge.
Understanding teacher knowledge in this way helps us understand the practices that
Janice and Karen engaged in with Lia and her classmates and help us understand lives in
school narratively.
In the research I have been part of for many years now, we have studied many moments
such as the moment with the young child Lia. It is through attending to such moments
narratively, seeing schools narratively, that we have come to understand teachers’
knowledge, teachers’ contexts and what it means for lives in schools.
In closing, I want to return to where I began. Why is it important to understand lives in
school narratively? It is not that I think we do not learn something about lives in school
when we see them measured by test scores, as seen as measures of achievement, of
motivation, and so on. But if this is the only way we see lives in schools, we fail to see so
much of what is important to understand about lives in schools. Seeing schools
narratively allows us to see Lia as a child, as someone learning to compose her life
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through her experiences in school. We see all children as individuals trying to make sense
of their lives as they experience what happens to them in schools. We see Janice and
Karen as teachers trying to compose educative spaces for children, trying to make sense
of each child’s life as they encounter subject matter, each other, the world around them.
We see the complexities, the uncertainties, the intellectual, the moral, the affective
dimensions of composing and living out of lives in school. In attending narratively we
honor the lives of people who are in the process of composing their lives. It is important
that we pay close attention to the kinds of spaces that we, as teachers, researchers, policy
makers and others, create in these storied landscapes. It is this way of seeing that narrative
inquirers such as myself bring to understanding lives in school.
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