ON-LINE ISSUES

V.4 N.1, March 1997

CURRICULUM AS NARRATIVE/ NARRATIVE AS CURRICULUM: LINGERING IN THE SPACES

by Carl Leggo

Department of Language Education
University of British Columbia

Education is at once a narrative and political enterprise and . . . the more we know about narrative and its many forms, the more we will also come to know about the storied nature of the politics of personal experience. (Graham 36)

The "I" is the location of a stream of possibilities. (Grumet 66)

1. I am delighted that the editors of Educational Insights have devoted this issue to some of the essays and poems which were presented at the conference Curriculum as Narrative/Narrative as Curriculum: Lingering in the Spaces, held at the University of British Columbia on May 2 and 3, 1996. When the organizing committee (Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Wanda Hurren, Carl Leggo, Renee Norman, Linda Peterat, Elizabeth Sparks, and Brenda Trofanenko) first began dreaming the conference, we wondered how many people would be interested in exploring the connections between curriculum and narrative. We were overwhelmed with the number of proposals, and especially with the range of issues and themes and approaches that were represented in the proposals. At times it seemed like a clandestine community of educators interested in narrative were calling out, convening, acknowledging the fascinating work they were doing, and celebrating the discovery of so many others who shared their keen interests. Conference participants examined a wide range of issues related to curriculum and narrative from personal, postmodern, postcolonial, performative, pedagogical, and poetic perspectives.

2. The spirit of the conference was a spirit of honouring. Ted Aoki delivered a keynote address, followed by a celebration of poetry and story when Ted was honoured for the ways that he has inspired many students and educators to linger in the spaces between curriculum and narrative. Ted Aoki reminds us poetically that "living in the spaces is what teaching is" (10). For Ted "the important thing is to understand that if in my class I have 20 students, then there are 21 interspaces between me and students. These interspaces are spaces of possibilities. So what we allow to happen, what can be constituted and reconstituted in those interspaces is what we mean by life in the classroom" (10). Of course there are also interspaces between each student and all the others, contributing to an intricate network of lines and spaces of connection and communication, perhaps without end. The poet Robin Blaser writes that "the sacred returns with all its faces, fiery-footed" (39), and in the following poem dedicated to Ted Aoki I express my sense of the sacred as integrally connected to "the teacher's way."

   THE TEACHER'S WAY
   lingering in the spaces of the sentence
   (for Ted Aoki)

   1. on the edge of morning
      a heron stands still
      in the slough near the dyke
      where I walk daily.
      gulls hang in the sky.
      a sea lion rests with the river.
      an eagle watches from the tallest alder.
      the whole world lingers.

      this is the teacher's way

   2. I too wait and watch,
      my image upside down
      in the smooth river,
      all the world
      topsy turvy but
      still in balance,
      learning to be still, even
      in a vertiginous world.

      this is the teacher's way

   3. I meet an old woman
      who asks, can you tell me
      where to find the slough
      with chocolate lilies?
      they only flower in April, she says.
      I have never seen chocolate lilies,
      I confess. I look for them.
      I am glad she invited me to look.

      this is the teacher's way

   4. on the edge of the day I
      dance and laugh all the ducks
      in the slough in the air.
      our wild line scribbling
      writes the earth, writes us
      in the prepositions
      which connect all
      the parts of the sentence.

      this is the teacher's way

   5. spring light fills the aspens alders apples
      along the dyke where I loiter,
      the world conjured in ancient stories,
      a space for play where
      the past is remembered
      for wisdom in the present
      and hope for the future, knowing
      always the possibilities of verbs.

      this is the teacher's way

3. One of the main themes explored by conference participants is that when we write the narratives of lived and living experiences, we must be careful that we do not misrepresent the complexity of the experiences by writing narratives that exclude and silence difference and conflict and confusion in a misdirected zeal to produce tidy linear narratives with appropriately happy endings. Instead we need to honour the multiplicity and meaning-making and mystery that are at the heart of the searching in our research. The essays and poems included in this issue of Educational Insights all seek to honour multiplicity, meaning-making, and mystery.

4. In her moving essay "Elders' Narratives in Hawai'i: an Ancestry of Experience" Leilani Holmes honours the significance of listening to and learning from the narratives of our elders. She investigates her own Hawaiian oral tradition by listening to several elders. Leilani organizes the stories of the elders around several themes, all with important insights for constructing pedagogy, schooling, and curriculum that focus on living with ecological and ethical sensitivity with the earth. As Leilani writes, "Formal schooling has had a devastating impact on Hawaiian knowledge systems. The everyday stories of elders, and their lessons have been whittled away as 'schooling' has displaced 'learning' in indigenous communities." Convinced that the stories of the elders "offer universal lessons for the world community needs," Leilani addresses the question, "How can we bring elders and their stories, into the schools?," and proposes "Oral Narrative Projects" as one useful way. This is an important essay which reminds us how schooling is frequently constructed around a restricted set of narratives that sustain authorized political-cultural-social "realities" while excluding many other views and perspectives and traditions and possibilities.

5. In "Writing and the Body" Celeste Snowber Schroeder investigates themes that urgently need attention in curriculum studies--the relationships between listening, solitude, the body, and writing. By ruminating on links between hermeneutics and autobiography and feminism, Celeste reveals how the body and writing are integrally connected. She includes in the essay several practical suggestions for inviting students to know the rhythm of writing through their bodies. Celeste writes with a keen pleasure for the mystery and music of language. Her essay is a moving testimony to ways of knowing that have traditionally been ignored in the academy, a clarion call to seek important changes in curriculum studies.

6. Margot C. Rosenberg's "Seams to Me: STO(stories)RIES of Death" is a moving and insightful account of life and death, love and grief. Margot describes the "narrative zigging and zagging" that comprises the journey of her research: "What happens when we risk disseminating ourselves in the public space of a classroom? We witness the blurring of the traditional separations between teacher-student, student-student, and knower-learner." As Margot shared her own story of grieving the death of her mother, she learned that the spaces between teachers and students do not have to be spaces of separation and isolation, but can be spaces of connection. Margot acknowledges the role of autobiography in our teaching: "I dwell in this space between life and death, as I dwell in the space between public pedagogical moments in the classroom and private pedagogical moments of reflection and life-writing."

7. In "Once Upon a Time" David Calhoon asks, "What is there about story?" In poetic prose he ruminates on the power of story to move us in ways that are emotional, esoteric, and energetic. David questions the notion of "stories as representations of experience": "If indeed story can bring a presence to us, it is always a new presence and never a re-presence, always a new presentation and never a representation, always our own presence and never the presence of an other." He winds his way through the complex possibilities of connection between lived and storied experiences, always demonstrating the power of story while never losing sight of the need to interrogate the role of story.

8. The many issues discussed in these four essays are humorously and poignantly echoed in gary rasberry's poems "To Do: On busyness and keeping lists and becoming a writer (the struggles of being a plain ordinary human being)" and "Further Distractions: More Reasons Not To Write." rasberry admits, "When I write I like to be organized and in control," but in his penchant for control he reminds us how writing is a process filled with surprises. He wants to "create a sacred space for writing," but finds himself once again at the "knife-fork coffee-spill all-night kitchen table writing room." There are many reasons why we do not write, but there are always more reasons why we desire the writing.

9. The spirit of the conference was honouring, and I want to continue the spirit of the conference by echoing and multiplying the questions generated as we lingered, and continue to linger, in the spaces between narrative and curriculum. I seek to honour the quest/ion/ing with the following questions:

   1. What is narrative? What is narrating?

   2. Who tells/writes narratives? Who can tell/write narratives? Who has the right to tell/write narratives?

   3. Whose/what narratives are told/written? not told/written? Who decides what narratives are told/written? Who decides who will tell/write the narratives that are told/written?

   4. Are narratives true? What is true/truth?

   5. Who/what are narratives about?

   6. How are narratives valued? not valued?

   7. What is the difference between fact and fiction?

   8. Are narratives accurate? how? in what ways?

   9. How do narratives relate to the person, the personal, the personality? Who is the person in a personal narrative?

   10. 10. How do narratives inform issues of practice and power?

   11. How are narratives constructed? constrained? construed? What rhetorical strategies and codes are used? What are the generic conventions of narratives? How are narratives shaped by convention(s)? How can narratives be reconceptualized through contravention(s)?

   12. What are the connections between narrative and issues of voice and autonomy?

   13. What are the differences between writing narratives and telling narratives?

   14. What are the relationships and links between narrative and myth, hoax, fantasy, lies, fabrication?

   15. What is the role of memory in narrative?

   16. What is the role of emotion in narrative?

   17. What is a "life"?

   18. What are the purposes, goals, values, and significances of narrative in curriculum research?

   19. What are the "true," "real" narratives of schooling?

   20. What are the similarities and the differences between your narratives and my narratives?

   21. What is the relationship between the private and the public in narrative? between the subjective and the objective? between the personal and the political?

   22. What happens in a narrative? What doesn't happen in a narrative? What does what happens or doesn't happen mean or signify?

   23. How does narrative relate to intentionality?

   24. How does narrative interplay with experience and interpretation?

   25. Is a narrative always partial? always filled/riddled with holes (and hopes) and gaps?

   26. Do narratives surprise? How?

   27. How does a narrative objectify? subjectify?

   28. How does a narrative relate to art and estrangement and contradiction?

   29. How do narratives influence the past, the present, and the future? How do the past, the present, and the future influence narratives?

   30. How does a writer deal with the following questions in writing a narrative: who? what? where? when? why? how?

   31. How do I respond to narratives I do not like? find morally and ethically reprehensible?

   32. How does the educator affirm as well as interrogate the narratives of others?

   33. What can we learn about re/searching narrative and education from the following people: Ted Aoki, Thomas E. Barone, Catherine Bateson, Shari Benstock, Roy Bentley, Wendy Bishop, Deborah Britzman, Jerome Bruner, Sydney Butler, Richard Butt, Joseph Campbell, John D. Caputo, Terrance Carson, Seymour Chatman, D. Jean Clandinin, Arda Coles, Robert Coles, Michael Connelly, Maureen Connolly, Suzanne de Castell, Kieran Egan, Suzanne Egan, Elliot W. Eisner, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Lynn Fels, Laurie A. Finke, Harry Garfinkel, William Gass, Gerard Genette, Amadeo Georgi, Larry Crabb, Ivor F. Goodson, Robert J. Graham, Maxine Greene, Madeleine R. Grumet, Wanda Hurren, Margaret Hunsberger, bell hooks, David W. Jardine, Marlene Kadar, Gary Knowles, Carl Leggo, Carolyn Mamchur, Renee Norman, Joanne Pagano, Jim Parsons, Linda Peterat, William F. Pinar, Donald Polkinghorne, Gary Rasberry, Danielle Raymond, William M. Reynolds, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Carolynne Sinclaire, David Smith, Stephen Smith, Rena Upitis, Max van Manen, Patrick Verriour, Hayden White, John Willinsky, Meguido Zola?

   34. How does the word become flesh and the flesh become word in a narrative?

   35. What is the relationship between narrative and experience? reality? experienced reality?

   36. Is narrative a process? method? product?

   37. In narrative is the emphasis on inner life or external life? What is the difference?

   38. In narrative does the "I" always control? Where does the "I" come from? Who controls the "I"?

   39. What is the power of a narrative to move readers?

   40. What is the interest of narrative? What motivates narrative?

   41. How fair, just, valuable is it to ask students to write personally? What are the ethical and political ramifications of narrative?

   42. How does a narrative differ when it is written by a participant or an observer or a researcher? How is a first person narrative different from a third person narrative?

   43. What are the lines of connection between a narrative and chronology, order, space, hierarchy, pattern, choice(s), structure, and integration?

   44. How can a narrative be used to communicate with a diverse audience about issues of education?

   45. What narratives are told/written/lived/translated/ perpetuated in schools? What narratives are not told/written/lived/translated/perpetuated in schools?

   46. In what ways do narratives influence writers and readers and tellers and listeners?

   47. How is narrative connected to text? texture? reality? representation? mimesis? deigesis? culture? history? rhetoric? language?

   48. How does narrative mythologize, demythologize, and remythologize experiences?

   49. How does narrative relate to hermeneutics?

   50. How does narrative relate to desire? How does narrative relate to the desire for a beginning, a ground, a presence, an ending?

   51. What is similar and what is different in the following: phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, radical hermeneutics, human science research, ethnomethodology, ethnography, action research, historiography, anecdotes, memoirs, reminiscenses, case studies, lifewriting, life history, biography, autobiography, creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, narrative poetry, narratology, journalism (new and old), mythology, mytho-poetics, history, cinema, personal practical knowledge, stories of teaching, postmodern fiction, journals, diaries, letters, court records, reports, comic books, photography, art?

   52. Is a narrative always a scandal, a cause for stumbling? Do narratives always cause us to stumble by preventing our easy passage through reality, our wilful blindness and deafness to the ruptures, the differences, the dissonances, the gaps, the other and alternative realities that interrupt the seeming seamlessness of our apparently real lived experiences?

   53. How does narrative relate to creativity?

   54. What are the connections between narrative and theory?

   55. What are the connections between narrative and expository prose?

   56. What are the effects, influences, repercussions, reverberations of narrative?

   57. How does a narrative relate to a reader's responses? In other words, how does a narrative invite or constrain or nurture or construe or construct a reader's responses and counter-narratives?

   58. How is a narrative connected to a discourse community?

   59. In what ways can narratives be subversive, transgressive, critical, radical, deconstructive, anarchic, interruptive, disturbing?

   60. What are the generic conventions and expectations and boundaries of the narrative form?

   61. How is the particularity and specificity of a narrative related to the generalizability and universality and multiplicity of human lived experience?

   62. Is my narrative also your narrative?

   63. How does a narrative relate to transcendence, immanence, manifestation, revelation, eschatology, contingency, radiance?

   64. Are narratives inappropriately appropriated by story-tellers and story-writers?

   65. What is the power, the pull, the magnetism, the dynamism of narrative?

   66. Are we afraid to tell/write some narratives? What are the narratives that cannot be told--the narratives told out of school--the narratives whispered in the staffroom washroom only? What narratives are we reluctant to tell? What censors control our telling/writing narratives?

   67. Who controls narratives? Who owns narratives? What narratives can students tell teachers and other students and parents? What narratives can teachers tell students and other teachers and parents?

   68. How are narrative and epistemology linked? narrative and knowledge(s)?

   69. How can narratives be used by marginalized and oppressed and disadvantaged groups/peoples/constituencies?

   70. How does narrative relate to self, self-awareness, self-realization, self-actualization, self-narration, selfishness, self-centeredness, self-understanding, self-knowing, self-knowledge, self-consciousness, self-determination, self-familiarity, self-construction, self-conceptualization, self-contradiction, self-generation, self-representation?

   71. How is narrative related to subjectivity, subject positions, transcendental ego, I, identity, individuality, and character?

   72. Where do narratives come from?

   73. How do narratives relate to communities, intertextuality, collective experience, social engagement and interaction, and intersubjectivity?

   74. How many kinds or modes or types of narrative are there?

   75. What are the rhetorical strategies of narrative?

   76. What can educators learn about composing narratives from postmodern fiction writers like Borges, Barth, Barthelme, Barnes, and Bowering?

   77. Who authors a ghostwritten narrative?

   78. How does a narrative relate to realism and naturalism?

   79. What are the differences between biography and autobiography?

   80. How are the narratives of teachers and students situated in institutional and political and cultural and social contexts?

   81. What do writers learn from writing teacher narratives? What do readers learn from reading teacher narratives?

   82. What counts as narrative knowledge/knowing?

   83. In narrative research where is authority situated?

   84. In what ways is narrative collaborative?

   85. What are the connections between experienced reality and linguistic reality?

   86. What are the consequences and effects and repercussions of telling/writing narratives?

   87. How are narratives constrained by a desire for narrative unity and coherence and closure?

   88. What is a postmodern narrative? What would narrative be like if it were open and flexible and multiple in perspective, contradictory and conflictual and contested?

   89. Who/what constructs and creates meaning?

   90. What are the advantages/disadvantages of narrative for educational research? Does narrative in education research promise a more democratic, more egalitarian, more empowering, more emancipatory, more sensitive approach to understanding the dynamics of school experience?

   91. Is narrative research undertheorized? Can narrative research be used to bridge the gaps between theory and practice?

   92. How can narrative in educational research lead to changes in schooling practice?

   93. In narrative research is the researcher seeking to reveal the essences of a lived experience or seeking to uncover the impossibility of essences amidst the contradictions and ruptures and fissures?

   94. How are narrative and ideology connected?

   95. Is the narrative approach archaeological, archetypical, anarchistic, arrogant?

   96. What are the available positions for the researcher in a narrative: disembodied voice, active participant, distanced observer?

   97. How can narratives include and re/present and interrogate the plural and powerful dynamics of social construction like gender, race, ethnicity, color, size, age, religion?

   98. How does narrative research relate to suppression? oppression? subjugation? silence?
   99. How do readers affect and write and influence the construction of a narrative?
   100. How self-reflexive must the narrative researcher be? How self-reflexive can the narrative researcher be?
   101. What are the ethics of narrative research?
   102. How does narrative research relate to issues of subordination of research subjects and political relationships?
   103. In what ways are narratives alienating and estranging?
   104. In what ways is narrative "life-like"? In what ways can narrative be reconceived to be "like-life"?
   105. What metaphors best serve our use of narratives in educational research (or in daily life): photographs, slides, motion picture, dramatic script, picture book, puzzle?
   106. Is a narrative quest a narrative quest/ion/ing?
   107. Are there differences between literacy narratives (or narratives as literature) and education narratives (or narratives for educational research)?
   108. In what ways is writing a narrative diagnostic and therapeutic?
   109. How (in what ways) are different narrative forms related to political goals? In other words, how is rhetoric political?
   110. Why are narratives told/written? Where are narratives told/written? When are narratives told/written?
   111. When we write narratives of experience are we seeking to close down the experiences by containing them, or elevate experiences by investing them with meaning, or reduce experiences to their primary essences?
   112. What is the etymology of narrative?
   113. What are the questions that need to be asked about narrative and education?
   114. When will the participants at the conference Curriculum as Narrative/Narrative as Curriculum: Lingering in the Spaces meet again for more lingering together?

References

• Blaser, R. (1983). Syntax. Vancouver: Talonbooks.

• Graham, R.J. (1993). Decoding teaching: The rhetoric and politics of narrative form. Teaching and Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry, 8(1), 30-37.

• Grumet, M. R. (1988). Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

• (1994). Interview with Ted Aoki. Teacher. 6 (7), 10.