A marginal story as a place of possibility: negotiating self on the professional knowledge landscape

Abstract

Drawing on a two-year study focusing on teacher identity and marginalization within diverse school landscapes, we explore the educative and miseducative qualities of response as told through one teacher’s story. By reconstructing and making meaning of this story through the conceptual framework of the “professional knowledge landscape” [Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York: Teachers College Press], we consider how this teacher’s identity—which we understand narratively as “story to live by”—shapes, and is shaped, within the in- and out-of-classroom places on her school landscape. Through a final retelling of this narrative, we pay close attention to the response which emerged from each of these fundamentally different places and we examine this teacher’s negotiation of her story to live by in relation to a school story of inclusion. This focus enables us to name borders of power, judgment and silence, and “bordercrossings” [Anzaldúa, G. (Ed.). (1990). Making face, making soul=Haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by feminists of color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books], which are shaped within “public homeplaces” [Belenky, M., Bond, L., & Weinstock, J. (1997). A tradition that has no name: Nurturing the development of people, families, and communities. New York: BasicBooks]. We believe that this story is a place of possibility—possibility for understanding the central role that presence to our narrative histories plays in enabling us to live and to sustain stories that run counter to those being scripted for us on school landscapes.