Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which narratives speak to issues of national identity - its production, reproduction, and contextual performance. Drawing first upon literature in history education, the paper explores the multivoiced nature of the historical narratives which structure American national identity projects. The paper next employs phenomenological methodology in order to explore the narratives produced by students in speaking about school experiences, which they found to have a national component. In this section, there is a particular focus on the teacher as a powerful text as read by students - a curriculum of its own right. The paper concludes by moving to theorize, using phenomenological and post-structural analyses, the relationship between the personal and the national, lived and historical experiences - while maintaining a focus on the civic and pedagogical implications of the data analysis.
Highlights
Connecting narratives of lived experience to identity is an important task for educational researchers interested in a transformational view of the United States of America (USA), schooling, society, and citizenship
We seek to raise the question of the degree to which the focus on subject-matter standardization has resulted in powerful-classroom experiences; ones students draw upon in constructing their identities. We pose this question in light of the tendency to understand subject matter as distinct from its potential pedagogical enactments, by real fleshand-blood teachers, ones who are managing much more than subject-matter considerations at any one point in the moment
One issue raised by this paper has been the manner in which educational researchers might best think about national identity and the school’s role in its transmission
Summary
Connecting narratives of lived experience to identity is an important task for educational researchers interested in a transformational view of the United States of America (USA), schooling, society, and citizenship. Schooling has historically played an important role in these processes, as it provides young people with some of their first experiences in communal membership. How young people experience schools impacts the stories they tell about themselves, but what the stories tell about the groups to which they belong. This paper examines the ways in which narratives of schooling are performed and the civic opportunities, which these “identity resources” both deny and afford (Wertsch, 2002). It does this though analyses of students’ lived experiences.
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