clandinin_narrative understandin of teacher knowladge

7/29/2019 Clandinin_Narrative Understandin of Teacher Knowladge

1/18

Journal of Curriculum an d Supervision 315Summer 2000, Vol. 15, No. 4, 315-331

M NABJRATIVE UNDER ST ANDINGS' ^ ^ F TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

F. MICHAEL CONNELLY, University of TorontoD. JEAN CLANDININ, University of Alberta

ABSTRACT: In this paper we explore two interrelated questions. The first questionis "How should we think about teacher knowledge?" Using two different studies,we develop a notion of a three-dimensional narrative inquiry space as a way tothink narratively about teacher knowledge. The second question is "What is teacherknowledge?" For this question we outline two sets of termsprofessional knowl-edge landscape and personal practical knowledge. Using these two sets of termswe develop a narrative understanding of teaching in one school's science class-room. We use classroom field texts focused on two child-oriented teachers and ateacher aide. The teachers have very different views on how a particular scienceunit should be taught. We explore these differences by thinking narratively (ques-tion 1) about detailed classroom events that occur over a period of time. Althoughthe teachers have similar child-oriented philosophies, their differing rhythms ofteaching are used to account for the teaching differences. Philosophy and rhythmare aspects of teacher knowledge (question 2).

'hen I film my image I feel myself like a little boat floating overthe water on a journey. Around me, there is a beautiful land-scaperocks, mountains, flowers, grass and trees shining amongthe bamboo light. Above me, there is a blue sky. Through the air comesDvorak's The New World. Against me is either a comfortable breeze or ablowing wind. I am crossing an overlapping space embracing two cultures.I have to be careful about water underneath me and the wind around meor against me so as not to be gulped by them."'

A "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students teaches culturally relevantpedagogy, doesn't she?^Authors' Note: A version of this article was presented as a keynote address atthe National Science Education Leadership Association's Summer Institute, Cambria,


2/18

3 l6 Narrative Understandings of Teacher Knowledge

A "good" te ach er of itnmigrant an d ESL stud ents pu ts culture at tiie fore-front of her teaching, doesn ' t h Â "good" teache r of immigrant an d ESL stude nts is more w ill ing to em brac emulticultural educ ation, isn't h Â "good" teach er of immigrant and ESL studen ts can be a go od role m ode lfor immigrant students, can' t she?'A "good" teach er of immigrant and ESL studen ts has had the ex perie nce ofbeing an immigrant, or is a minority, or, if not, then like me, she has hadthe experience of l iving in another culture or other cultures, learning otherlanguages, and this makes her more empathetic to minority and immigrantstudents, doesn't it?Â "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students is very loving towards im-migran t children an d is a com m unity activist, isn't ^Minority teachers can help prepare all students for the multicultural work-place and global economy of the present and future, can't they?^

"When I began to do research in Bay Street School in Pam's classroom, Iknew the answers to all those questions on the l ist . The answer was a re-sounding, unequivocal, very loudly shouted, 'Yes'! . . . Can you imagine myshock w he n I beg an to realize that Pam d id not follow my script? . . . Asthe literature fenced in my thinking, I attempted to fence in Pam. Pam wasa 'visible minority,' Black, immigrant. Surely she would follow the visibleminority immigrant teacher's script I and others had been crafting? The an-swer to that question was a resounding no. This is when the strugglesbegan; this is when the dilemmas surfaced. This is when I put my values,my beliefs, my ways of thinking, and my everyday way of engaging in lifeun de r scrutiny and threw th em into question. " '

'X. Su, "Why Teach? Profiles and Entry Perspectives of Minority Teachers asBecomin g Teach e r s , " /o wm a/ of Research and Developm ent in Education 29 (March1996): 117-133.'*Ibid,5p. Graham, "Black Teachers: A Drastically Scarce Resource," Phi Delta Kap-pan (April 1987): 598-605.^X. Su, "Why Teach? Profiles and Entry Perspectives of Minority Teachers asBecoming Teachers," foumal of Research and Developm ent in Education 29 (March1996): 117-133.


3/18

E. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin 317

The two quotations that bracket the questions about "a goodteacher" are drawn from two quite different studies of teacherknow ledge. In the first, Ming Fang He explores three Chinese teach-ers' learning during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and their ad-justment to North America, where they pursue higher education. Shetraces her participants' narrative life courses, attending to theirmovements among cultures, and studies their changing stories to liveby, their changing identities.In the second study, JoAnn Phillion inquires into an urbanteacher's teaching practices^which Phillion expected, at the outset,to be mostly a demonstration of multicultural knowledge and the-ory. The study develops into an intensely reflective process in whichthe classroom knowledge of the teacher, Pam, as expressed in herpractices, leads Phillion to question her own knowledge and, in-deed, to question the more or less taken for granted knowledge inthe field.The purpose of this article is to present a personal and contex-tual narrative understanding of teacher know ledge. Why, then, do werefer to two such disparate studies? First, it is important to approachthe topic of teacher knowledge as a straightforward, commonplace,everyday aspect of human experience. It is not something esoteric re-quiring special technical or theoretical academic insights. We Canlearn about teacher knowledge from He's study of Chinese womenimmigrants and PhiUion's study of an elementary school teacher. Wecan learn, too, from the experiences of each of them doing their stud-ies. Ming Fang He is part of the phenom ena she describes, and JoAnnPhiUion's knowledge of teaching is put into question by Pam'sknowledge of teaching. If we pay attention to our students and toourselves, we can learn and enhance our own knowledge, as didthese two researchers.The second reason for bringing these studies forward is thatthey shed light on how teachers and researchers might think aboutteacher knowledge. This creates a dual agenda for this article: Howshould we think about teacher knowledge? and What is teacherknowledge? In the following section we use He's and PhiUion's workto address the first question. We then consider the second questionby exploring the teaching of a grades 7-8 science unit in an urbanschool.


4/18

318 Narrative Understandings of Teacher Knowledge

Recently we have begun to ask: What is the link between narrativeand teacher knowledge? Over the years, we have studied teacherknowledge in various ways. We think of teacher knowledge in nar-rative terms, describing it in terms of narrative life constructions. Wedo not see teacher knowledge as something fixed and static to bereplaced by something else, but as something lifelike, somethingstoried, something that flows forward in ever changing shapes.Teachers and students do not, in our view, come together as bear-ers of mature and immature knowledge, the immature to be re-placed by the mature. Rather, we see everyone, teachers and stu-dents, living out stories in which they figure as characters. What weor anyone else knows^what student and teacher may be said toknoware expressions of those stories. To understand what hap-pens when teacher and student meet in teaching-learning situations,it is necessary to understand their stories.

The stories these narratives are built on are both personal, re-flecting a person 's life history, and social, reflecting the professionalcontexts in which teachers live. These professional contexts, whichwe call teachers' professional knowledge landscapes,^" are also nar-ratively constructed. We live in a world of stories, and, though wehelp shape those stories, we are shaped by them. Our stories, andthe shaping stories of our professional knowledge landscapes, arenarratively constructed. Both our personal stories and our landscapestories have moral, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions.This is a brief sketch of teacher knowledge understood in termsof storied people living on storied landscapes. Thus, we both defineand think about teacher knowledge narratively. Accordingly, we saythat narrative is both phenomenon and method. Teacher knowl-edge, the phenomenon, is narrative; and the way we think about it,and study it, is narrative. Thus, our work on narrative inquiry is, forus, an outgrowth of our study of teacher knowledge.He's and Phillion's work allows us to see the broad ouflines ofhow one thinks narratively about teacher knowledge.Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space

In recent work we describe how one learns to think narra-tively." We imagine that to think narratively one is positioned withina three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, with the three dimen-


5/18

F. Michael Connelly and D.fean Clandinin \ 319

and place. As we try to understand teacher knowledge, we see it assomething flexible and fluid, depending on the situation. We cangive an account of teacher knowledge using a three-dimensional nar-rative inquiry space. We imagine a teacher's knowledge to be posi-tioned along each of these dimensions and, therefore, to inhabit athree-dimensional space.Temporal. Our work on teacher knowledge is informed by JohnDewey's writing on experience.^^ One of Dewey's criteria of experi-ence is continuity. Everything we experience grows out of prior ex-perience and enters into new experience. This leads us to think ofteacher knowledge as something with a past and a future. When He

writes, "When I film my image I feel myself like a little boat floatingover the water on a journey," she is speaking about her knowledgeof herself. In talking about this knowledge, she talks about a jour-ney, something that takes place over time. Her knowing of herself istemporal. Moreover, her overall study is temporal as she reviews herknowledge development in China and in Canada and as she peersinto the future to wonder how she will know herself in her newWestern academic world. Likewise, as Phillion contrasts her knowl-edge of urban school teaching at the beginning of her research withideas developing throughout the study, she is giving a temporal nar-ration of her knowledge of this matter. Neither He nor Phillion givesa sense that her knowledge at one time was primitive and at anothertime more complete, nor that one kind of knowledge has been re-placed by another. Rather there is continuitytemporal continuitywith a present made up of the past, like but unlike it.

Personal/Existential. The second dimension of teacher knowl-edge is a personal/existential dimension. A second criterion of ex-perience for D ewey is interaction, by which he m eant the exchangestaking place between a person's inner self and the surroundingworld. We adopted this notion to think of teacher knowledge ascomposed of personal and existential, inner and outer, qualities. Onthese grounds no one's knowledge is purely personal or purely ex-ternal. For example, in the sciences, this means that a teacher'sviews can never be only his or her own; and it means, less obvi-ously, that science is not what is found in books or in universitycourses and libraries. Scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is al-ways tinged by the personal, by how an individual knows it.Polanyi, a chemist, referred to this knowledge as "personal knowl-


6/18


"the water underneath me and the wind around me," she is drawingattention to the existential, to the things outside her personal selfthat influence what she knows. Phillion's study is also about the in-teraction of the personal and the existential. It is about how the storyof teaching she put herself into by agreeing to be a narrative inquirerin Pam's classroom interacts with, and modifies, her own knowl-edge. Pam's teaching, the class experience, the school, and the com-munity interact with Phillion's personal knowledge.Place. The third dimension of teacher know ledge is place. Placemight be considered part of the existential, part of the environmentwith which the personal interacts. But place has such a special qual-ity in teacher knowledge that we think of it as a third dimension inournarrative inquiry space. Virtually everything changes in som e sig-nificant measure as teacher narratives urfold in different places. ForHe the places are China and Canada, and, as her narrative unfolds,these consist of different specific places. He's places create what shecalls an "overlapping space" that she thinks of as "embracing twocultures." Though not as evident in the cited excerpt from Phillion'swork, place plays an important role in Pam's stories, as she talksabout the Caribbean, Bay Street School, and other teaching sites inCanada; as Phillion talks about her upbringing and her teaching lifejuxtaposed against Bay Street School and its community; and as thechildren are described as coming from different countries to Canadaand ' to Bay Street School. Place plays an important role in under-standing the three Chinese women's knowledge in He's study, andPam's and Phillion's knowledge in Phillion's study.The Context for Discussion

In the following section, we address the second question: Whatis teacher knowledge? There is no one-to-one correspondence be-tween the two questions. Echoes of the three-dimensional narrativeinquiry space are apparent throughout the discussion of teacherknowledge, which focuses on a grades 7-8 science unit team-taughtby Sam, his coteacher Helen, and Jeanette, a teacher aide, in a three-room Learning Center at Bay Street School.^"^ We can see temporal-ity in Sam's teaching; relations between the existential and the per-sonal in Sam's teaching landscape; and the power of place shapingSam's knowledge of science teaching.


7/18

F. Michael Connelly and D. fean Clandinin 321

Figure 1. Grades 7-8 Science UnitMay 1985

During the month of May we will be studying1) characteristics of living things 4) adaptation and behavior2) classification of living things 5) life cycles3) interdependence of living thingsThe five-day field trip will be centered around these units along with rocks andminerals. Those students not going on the five-day trip will participate in the seriesof one-day trips that week, including a trip to the farm.Students are to work in groups of two to four to collect material, develop an exhibit,and make a presentation. Each group will study their specimens and report on thefollowing characteristics:1) classification 8) adaptation2) movement and locomotion inherited behavior3) growth tropisms and taxesasexual and sexual reproduction learned behaviorlife cycles protective mechanisms4) reproduction body language5) metabolism 9) natural community6) cellular basis of life 10) ecosystem7) irritability 11) producer, consumer, and food chains

12) photosynthesis/respiration13) food chains

in marginal economic and social circumstances. Jeanette was anAfrican-Canadian teacher aide with strong connections to parentsand children in the community. They did innovative things together,such as a school lunch program involving students and parents. In1984 the two-member team expanded to three with the inclusion ofHelen, someone also storied as a child-oriented teacher, but storieddifferently than Sam.Figure 1 is an excerpt from a class handout describing the grades7-8 science unit. The unit covers five topics in biology as well asrocks and minerals. Student reports are to cover a wide array of bi-ology topics and concepts. The field trips, the exhibits, and the pre-sentations tie the unit together instructionally.


8/18


WHAT IS TEACHER KNOWLEDGE?There is a saying that the world is visible in a grain of sand.

Sam's teaching of the science unit is like this grain of sand. Carefulexamination of his teaching of the science unit reveals a great dealabout his knowledge, and teacher knowledge more generally.With our grain of sand in hand, we now set forth a language, aset of ideas, concepts, and terms for thinking about teacher knowl-edge. These fall into two interrelated areas: teachers' professionalknowledge landscape and teachers' personal practical knowledge.When we say "teacher knowledge" we mean both of these, thoughin any particular situation we may mean one more than the other.Professional Knowledge Landscape

Every teacher works in a particular setting in which things areknown in certain ways. We call this setting a professional knowl-edge landscape. Though it may seem that science is science, howscience is known depends upon the knowledge landscape in whicha teacher operates. Grades 7 and 8 science is not the same in anurban school, a northern native community school, a private schoolfor the wealthy, a university school, a science and technology-oriented school. Teacher knowledge of grades 7 and 8 science is notthe same everywhere. Rather, teachers know science in terms oftheir professional knowledge landscape. The landscape is part ofteacher knowledge.Landscape and Conduit. One of the most notable features of ateacher's professional knowledge landscape is its dependence onthe outside world. Many things are funneled onto the landscape as

if through a conduit. There may be departmental policies, a depart-mental chair and staff responsible for grade or divisional curriculum,a school administration responsible for various aspects of curricu-lum, and a school board and a government with curriculum policies.What may have seemed in university study to be a free and inde-pendent science is, in teaching, experienced as something partiallyimposed by others and something competing with other subjects fortime in the teaching cycle. Teachers are often judged on how wellstudents perform on tests associated with science curriculum poli-cies. Thus, a teacher knows science and science teaching not onlyas an academic scholarly topic but, perhaps more so, as a con-


9/18


in the year. The policy, in its temporal classroom context, was a keyforce in shaping events in Sam, Jeanette, and Helen's Learning Cen-ter in May and June.In- and Out-of Classroom Places. Teachers live their profes-sional lives in two places: in and out of the classroom. Epistemo-logically, from a knowledge point of view, these are fundamentallydifferent.^5 The out-of-classroom place is a place where teacherscope with transmissions through the conduit and where cover sto-ries of teaching are told. The classroom is a safe place for living outsecret stories of teaching. As described below, Sam and Helen havedifferent narrative histories with respect to these two landscapeplaces. These different narrative histories shape the story they livedtogether.

Nested Stories. One way of thinking about the landscape is thatit is a nest of stories into which one fits and becomes a character.Bay Street School was an urban school storied around the district asa racially troubled school with poor student achievement. The sto-ries of the students in grades 7 and 8 were stories of learning diffi-culty associated with culture, language, growth spurts, puberty, andsense of identity. The school board had recently implemented a pol-icy to raise student achievement and change the way students, andothers, viewed one another in racial terms. The principal, Phil Bing-ham, was hired because of school, school board, and communitystories of him as a community-oriented principal. He came to theschool via the conduit because of the stories of him and of theschool. Sam's project approach in science won approval because itwas consistent with the new principal's personal philosophy, some-thing we have written about elsewhere.^^ Both Sam and Helenshared a story of themselves as child-oriented teachers. But Helenwas storied as a disciplined, organized homeroom teacher and Samas a creative, independent teacher, oriented out of school.

Secret, Cover, and Sacred Stories. Secret stories refer to in-classroom stories of teaching hidden from public view. Cover storiesare stories told publicly out of the classroom. Sacred stories arestories one does not question, such as "Theory drives practice" or"Children come first in this school." We return to this set of storieslater in the article.


10/18


Personal Practical KnowledgeWhereas the professional knowledge landscape is contextual

and points outward, personal practical knowledge is individual andpoints inward. The terms, composed of aesthetic, moral, and affec-tive elements, are designed to create a language close to experience.This is a language of practice that refers to what teachers do as wellas to what they say. We have, through work with teachers such asSam, developed seven key terms: image, rule, practical principle,personal philosophy, metaphor, narrative unity, and rhythmP Ourdiscussion of the teaching of the science unit includes references topersonal philosophy and rhythm.

THE SCIENCE UNITWe begin in the staff room of Bay Street School, where we are seatedwith Sam. Ourfieldnotesfrom May 9,1985, give the following account:We then talked about boats since Sam is a fanatic, and in the middle of thisSam got a call telling him his science class was starting. We returned to theclassroom.

Sam launched into a lesson on classification. He began by having thekids classify sports. When someone would name a sport, he would say,"That is not a type; we are looking for a type." A classification system builton indoor versus outdoor, team versus individual, and so forth, was con-structed. Sam pointed out that different peop le have different classifica-tions. Jason asked if he would give them the "standard" classification. Hesaid he would when they got to the classification of living things.Students were then asked to classify the modes of transportation notedon the board. There was a fair amount of difficulty with it, but some stu-dents, such as Andrew, who had so much trouble with reading, got theidea, put up the title "Classification," and then noted "motor versus other."The rest of the period was taken up with student-suggested classifica-tions and Sam drawing a large diagram on the board. When this exercisewas complete students were asked to imagine different kinds of trans-portation devices. The idea was that by doing this they would come upwith additions to the classification system.The kids were totally task oriented during this time. Students who mightnormally have been disruptive made creative suggestions which were prob-ably designed to be disruptive but which showed the amount of thinkinggoing on. For instance, Walter suggested balloons and argued that balloonswere natural (one of the categories on the board), while others argued thatballoons should be classified "by man" since the balloon would have been


11/18

F. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin 325

ing things into plants, animals, and protists. He then focused on verte-brates. Students were asked to give examples, and they ended up sayingthey (students) were animals and would be classified as vertebrates.

Three things in these fieldnotes are important to our account ofSam ' s k n o wled g e :1. Sam is in the staff room talking about boats . He needs to becal led be ca us e the c lass is asse m bled an d w ai t ing .2. Although the classroom discussion is s tructured, i t s tarts withwhat the ch i ld ren know.3. At the end of the lesson, Sam keeps the s tudents pas t thes ch ed u led t im e .

THE RESEARCH PUZZLESEarlier we said the world is visible in a grain of sand. In thebrief fieldnotes de scr ibin g the dis cu ssio n of. classification, sc ien ceteaching in the Learning Center is visible. The excerpt is l ike a grainof sand.Several puzzl ing features of the events surrounding th is uni t areexplained, at least part ial ly, by thinking narrat ively: the tension be-tween Sam and h is coteachers ; the s t ructure of science subject mat-ter in the unit ( that is , the l is t of s ix unit topics and project reporttopics) , puzzl ing because one teaching uni t includes so many dis-parate topics ; and the s t ructure of the uni t overal l f rom beginning toend, puzzl ing because the project -or iented , out-of-school act iv i t iesdo not appear to take in to account the t ime crunch involved in t ry-

ing to cover so many science topics in such a short t ime.Tension Between the Teachers

Though the s tudents had v is i ted the farm eadier in the year ,Sam plans to make the field trip to the farm the science unit 's "grandfinale ." H elen a nd Jea net te bel ieve th is is a w aste of t ime, be ca usethey think the planned activit ies are repeti t ive and inefficient . Theirknowledge d i ffers f rom Sam's . To make sense of these d i fferences ,we beg in by exp lo r ing Sam's persona l ph i losophy and the d i f fe ren tteach ing rhy thms exper ienced by the t eachers .


12/18


acting. Brian made a negative comment, and Weisan took him seriously.He hit Brian. Brian lost his temper and beat Weisan up. Sam said that it wasextremely sad to see something like this deteriorate to physical violence. Itturned out that when he got the two of them together in a separate roomand talked to them that they both quite like each other. Sam said that thechildren have to try and see the positive things in each other.He said that Weisan is going through some difficult times because heis new to the country and he feels that people jeer him because of the wayhe talks and dresses and because he is so small. He then said that Brian isgoing through some personal problems of his own.He made the point that every one of the children had something pos-itive to offer to society and to the community. He said the communitywhich they are involved in at the moment is their classroom. He said thatthey all have great lives ahead of them with numerous career choices. Hesaid the way he looks after his car, he needs somebody who knows a lotabout cars to look after it. He said there are many different professions toconsider and that every one of them in the classroom has the potential toexcel at something.He said that they are also going through a stage in life when they arechanging from adolescents into young m en and young women and that canbe a pretty traumatic time. He said you can often be very wrapped upwithin yourself. He told them that you have to be aware of other people'sfeelings.He said that when they go to high school they will make some friendsthere that will be their friends for life. He said if they are always going tobe negative towards people they won't make very many friends. He saidthat this morning he found out that a very close friend of his from highschool had died. He said that this is the third person from his high schooldays that he has been close to that has died either through car accidents ornatural causes. Jason asked w hat hap pened to his friend this morning. Samsaid that he had had a heart attack.

Sam ended up by saying that today was Day 1 of a new cycle and thathe wanted all of them to start today in a very positive upbeat mood.This set of fieldnotes expresses Sam's personal philosophy in-

sofar as it relates to children and relations among people. Part of thisphilosophy addresses the futurefriends in high school and later inlife. Part of it addresses knowledge and skills and how people getalong in the world, doing things they are good at, everyone with arole to play.

This aspect of Sam's personal philosophy helps us think abouthis personal practical knowledge. He thinks about relationships


13/18


Aspects of Sam's philosophy show up in his science teaching.The unit handout states that "each group will be evaluated on theirdepth of study, their presentation, and their display." However,when it comes time to present their work, Sam has the students de-velop their own evaluation criteria. The process of doing this isrecorded in our fieldnotes of June 13, 1985:Sam had a class discussion on the science presentations which were to bemade by groups of three or four. They were to be judged and graded by agroup of ten students. Sam said they could decide the criteria to grade thepresentations. There was much discussion. They developed a list of eightitems: content, written report, oral presentation, visual presentation, obser-vations, depth of content, diagrams, and effort.There was discussion over neatness which Lilian suggested. Some stu-dents didn't feel this was appropriate. It was put to a class vote which ledto its inclusion. They now had nine criteria, so Sam said that they woulddouble the score on one of them to give 10 points. He asked the classwhich one they felt was the most important. The majority seemed to feelthat effort was the most important. Franca, however, mentioned content.Sam again put it to a vote, and the class overwhelmingly decided on effort,with three students putting up their hands for content. Franca elaboratedon what she meant by content. She said content should be judged individ-ually for each person. She felt that content depended on the person's ca-pability. She felt that some people were more capable than others andtherefore should be judged accordingly. Sam said that these were really in-sightful observations. He suggested that what she was explaining was moreeffort than content. She agreed.

In these two sets of fieldnotesSam's talk about the fight andhis discussion of evaluation criteriaSam's personal knowledge ofscience teaching takes shape in our observer minds. He knows sci-ence through his knowledge of people, especially his philosophy ofindividual difference and his respect for student knowledge. In thefirst set of notes, we find him transmitting his knowledge, almostpleading with students, to know themselves and others in the wayhe does. In the second set of notes, we find Sam fulfilling curric-ulum policy obligations for grading and report cards while havingstudents both design and apply an evaluation instrument to one an-other. There is consistency, which we call Sam's personal philoso-phy of teaching, in his telling in the first set of notes and in his elic-


14/18


Sam believes that people do different things in life and noteveryone has, or needs, the same knowledge. Though he does notsay so, we may surmise that Sam does not hold to the idea of eachstudent knowing the same science knowledge, nor even to the ideathat a curriculum policy might outline what knowledge is necessaryand required. The project-based science unit allowed different stu-dents to learn different things, a key feature of Sam's personal phi-losophy. Part of the tension over the unit derives from the fact thatothers think the mandatory science topics will not be properly cov-ered. This suggests a strong sense that each student should be taughtthe same things. Teased apart, Sam's personal philosophy appears toput him at odds with the science curriculum policy and with his twocoworkers. To further understand these puzzles, we turn to placeand temporality; we turn to where Sam has spent much of his teach-ing life and to how he is connected to in- and out-of-classroompla;ces on the landscape.

Sam provides a strong clue during a lunch conversation whenhe says that a proposed move to a more usual homeroom situationin another school next year will be very difficult for him. He saysthat after living on a farm, he found institutional life constraining.Sam was brought up on a farm, and the field trip he had plannedwas to his father's farm. Sam recently had sold his own farm, whichhe had sometimes used for school purposes.. For some years Sam had worked outside of a regular classroomin out-of-school settings and in a special education withdrawal set-ting. In the class arrangement described in this article, Sam, whohad been a withdrawal special education teacher at Bay Street Schoolthe year before, teamed up with Helen, a homeroom teacher, andJeanette, a teacher aide, to create a three-room complex known asthe Learning Center. The center served 42 children in grades 7 and824 regular students and 18 special education students. Instead ofwithdrawal, the two teachers and teacher aide constructed a com-plex grouping system organized around a six-day teaching cycle.Helen was known for her ability to connect with children, aswas Sam, and she was known for her structure, organization, and ef-ficiency. Helen's personality had a dramatic quality, and she wasknown for her ability to enchant children during her reading period.She led what one might call a disciplined, student-oriented institu-


15/18


of associated activities. Proper running of this complex class, fromHelen's point of view, depended on careful scheduling and adher-ence to regular timelines.Sam knew his teaching life in a much different way than Helenknew hers. The rhythms they each lived out around the six-daycycle were visibly different. Among other things, it was the collisionof these rhythms that helped to account for the different ways thetwo teachers knew their classroom and for the resulting tension andnegative judgment. Rhythms are temporal: rhythm refers to how oneexperiences time, and the activities that are played out in that time. ^Just as a person who does something outside his or her normalrhythmfor instance, arriving an hour later for workmay feel outof sorts and experience the whole day as being out of sync, one per-son's experience of another's rhythm may feel out of sync. More-over, people imbue these rhythms with moral overtones: it is notonly an error, it is morally wrong to violate the temporal expecta-tions set by rhythms. Helen might judge Sam's coming late to classnot only as an annoyance but also as indifference, lack of interest,and unethical behavior. Sam, on the o ther hand, might judge Helen'sdismissal of students in the middle of a science lesson so they couldarrive at their French lesson on time as inappropriate, unethical, andwrong for the students' learning.

Rhythms are also connected to the landscape, to place and itscircumstances. In the case of Sam and Helen, the key places areHelen's former homeroom, Sam's out-of-classroom places, especiallythe farm, and the Learning Center where the two teachers workedtogether. Helen's rhythm is connected to her experience as a home-room teacher within the school's six-day cycle. Sam's rhythm is con-nected to his experience outside the classroom and outside ofschool. Their different experiences, and different rhythms, collideand are out of sync with one another in the Learning Center, a newplace for them, a complex place requiring its own rhythms.In short, Sam and Helen are two student-oriented teachers whoplace children, children's social relations, and children's futuresabove the subject content of what is taught. Yet we find, via oursomewhat kaleidoscopic look through the three-dimensional narra-tive inquiry space, differences in time, place, and narrative historythat yield unexpected tension. Time, place, and narrative history


16/18

330 Narrative U nderstandings of Teacher Knowledge

The Puzzles over Content and Unit StructureReaders may have their own ideas about these puzzles. Contentcoverage and unit structure are expressions of Sam's knowledge.Sani teaches students to know science as he knows it, not as some-thing in bookstrue, immutable, and externalbut as something inlifefiuid, personal, and social. The entire science unit has a senseof wholeness about it; a sense of connection with, or unity between,the world out there and the world experienced and known. We areagain reminded of the chemist Polanyi's notion of personal knowl-edge. The trip to the farm is a climax, as are the project presenta-

tions and the principal's visit to view project work. The list of fivebiological curriculum areas plus rocks and minerals, and the list oftopics in the student reports, make sense in terms of Sam's student-oriented, holistic view. For Sam, this one unit covers everythinglisted in the guidelines. Although the curriculum policy might appearto lead to lessons on one and then another topic, Sam brings thetopics together in student projects involving in- and out-of-classroomactivities. There are, of course, difficulties, including setbacks in thecompletion of projects and disputes among children. But overall,Sam is satisfied with the way the unit is completed.

SACRED, SECRET, AND COVER STORIESWe described the child-oriented, put-children-first attitude aspart of Sam's and Helen's personal philosophy of teaching. This phi-losophy ultimately acts as a sacred story in the school, given theschool board policies and given the new principal's approach. Itwould have been unimaginable in this context for someone to say

that whether the students like it or not, they have to learn this orthat. Of course, teachers did follow the curriculum guidelines anddid believe that students needed to learn thingsscience, for exam-ple. But no one put subject matter over students.There were, of course, many things hidden from public viewsecret stories obscured by cover stories. In part, the way teacherstold others about the Learning Center was a cover story. The storycovered up some of the secret stories of tension between Sam andHelen. Sam's science unit, looked at from Helen's perspective, was acover story. Sam was able to report that all the science required by


17/18


time providing him with a formal defense, a cover story, for his sci-ence curriculum. The cover story was that the Learning Center wasworking well on behalf of children. The teachers kept the secret sto-ries safe and shared them with few others beyond ourselves.

A REFLECTIVE LOOK BACKloViLJLTo make sense of this notion of teacher know ledge, readers need to work out the ideas for themselves as appropriate to theirown landscapes, in terms of their own narrative histories. We wantto take the study of teaching out of its cloak of formalistic terms, ab-stract language, and distant methodologies. To that end, this article,with its description of some of the real-life drama of the LearningCenter, seeks to convey the ordinary, everyday quality of teachinglife. Like He's study of Chinese women immigrants and Phillion'sstudy of an urban elementary school teacher and her classroom, theLearning Center story is a helpful reminder of the everyday qualityof what it is we want to capture when we think narratively aboutteacher knowledge.

F. MICHAEL CONNELLY works at the Center for Teacher Development, On-tario Institute for Studies in Ed ucation of the University of Toro nto . D. JEAN CLAN-DININ works at the Center for Research for Teacher Education and Developmentat the University of Alberta.


18/18

Copyright of Journal of Curriculum & Supervision is the property of Association for Supervision & Curriculum

Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the

copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for

individual use.

clandinin_narrative understandin of teacher knowladge

Documents