Professional Knowledge Landscapes Research Articles

Living Out-of-Doors: A Narrative Inquiry Alongside Nipugtugewei Forest Kindergarten Teachers

In this paper, we draw upon a narrative inquiry alongside two creators of an out-of-doors Nipugtugewei Kindergarten program within a Mi’gmaw community, in northeastern Canada. Our intention was to understand their schooling, educational, and communal experiences over time. Diverse field texts were composed and interpreted alongside participants. We turned towards narrative conceptions of knowledge to show how attending to teachers’ personal practical knowledge and stories to live by on their professional knowledge landscape is sustaining who they are as teachers and people. It is also a way for teachers to live their responsibility to Indigenous communities and students.

Examining gender issues in education: exploring confounding experiences on three female educators’ professional knowledge landscapes

Business sources report that it will take 124 years for females to achieve parity in the workforce. Parity relates to compensation but also includes working conditions. The latter topic is taken up in this article using narrative inquiry as our method of investigation. Narrative inquiry—inquiring into narratives—employs three research tools: broadening, burrowing and storying/re-storying. To these tools, fictionalization, a fourth tool, is added. This is because the interwoven cases involve easily identifiable others and precautions need to be taken. This article discusses gender matters lived and told, and re-lived and re-told, over the career continuum of three women who have worked in public school and university settings. As females, they periodically encountered situations where they were perceived, interpreted, and responded to differently than males. The article looks at early, mid, and recent career challenges experienced in the female educators’ places of work. This research using narrative methods looks backward, forward, inside, and out through processes of individual and group reflection. It begins with bio-sketches, which were prepared individually. After that, the aforementioned research tools are used to unpack early, middle, and current career happenings. Reflective unpacking of the three females’ experiences within a community of critical friendship allowed for greater understanding and meaning-making to occur. The underlying intent of this work is to understand the shaping forces of gender on women’s professional lives—not to name and shame those who got away with acting the ways in which they did. The significance of the work lies in its use of narrative exemplars that are transparent, have a ring of authenticity to them, and promote trustworthiness and relatability when shared with others.

Narrative Inquiry into the Professional Identity-Making of Ghanaian Midwives.

Professional identity-making is a complex life-making endeavor that is shaped by both the personal and professional knowledge landscapes in which people live and work. Using narrative inquiry, four midwives who had worked in diverse contexts in Ghana were purposively selected. We highlight how midwives’ experiences across time, place, and in diverse contexts shape their professional identity-making. Three main life experiences that shape professional identity-making were discovered: 1. Childhood experiences, 2. Education experiences, and 3. Professional work experiences. Midwifery education should prepare students to attend to this complex and ongoing identity development, in order to enhance midwifery practice.

Being an early-career teacher–researcher in physical education: a narrative inquiry

ABSTRACT This paper describes my practitioner inquiry as a newly qualified teacher, initially used as a form of teacher learning, but ultimately became the reason I remained in the physical education (PE) teaching profession. In Scotland, early-career PE teachers are encouraged to embody the role of teacher–researcher and pursue Career-Long Professional Learning (CLPL) opportunities that nourish creative and enquiring dispositions. However, it is also understood that failure to integrate into political school structures, successfully managing workload and relationships, negotiating curricular content and aims and becoming a competent classroom manager can lead to dissatisfaction and attrition. Supported by critical friends, I use narrative inquiry to explore the contexts and people that shaped my learning during my initial years in the profession and factors contributing to my professional teaching identity. Through this process, I began to understand my professional knowledge landscape as an arena of contested stories that bump, intertwine and converge. This understanding was important for me to feel comfortable as a teacher–researcher and in my decision to remain in the profession. These findings reflect the capacity for growth inherent in a narrative understanding of experience and potential for sustaining PE teacher–researcher identities via research-based practitioner inquiry. Those within Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) should consider the application of narrative identity work to encourage early-career PE teachers to reflect on the personal, social, and contextual aspects of identity construction in their lives, with the hope they can effectively navigate the shifting landscape of twenty-first century PE.

‘I did not feel any passion for my teaching’: a narrative inquiry of beginning teacher attrition in China

ABSTRACT This study conceptualises teacher attrition as a dynamic process of identity construction and interpretation in shifting professional knowledge landscapes, which attunes to both individual and contextual milieus. From this perspective, this narrative inquiry describes the attrition experiences of two Chinese beginning teachers after two years of employment in two middle schools after being prepared in the Free Teacher Education (FTE) Program. Specifically, the beginning teachers experienced tensions in their ‘stories to live by’, characterised by the motivations for joining the FTE Program and the unsupportive professional landscapes. The ‘stories to leave by’ came to dominate their identities when the teachers could no longer sustain their images of who they thought they could be as curriculum makers. Other contextual elements included the burden of school administration and rigid teacher evaluation policies. The implications for fostering teacher identity development are discussed, especially for beginning teachers coming from the FTE Program in China.

Intentions of early career teachers: should we stay or should we go now?

ABSTRACT Early career teachers continue to flee the profession in many countries around the world. In a series of our own studies, we have attempted to better understand the intentions of early career teachers. In this paper, we build on themes that emerged in a 2015 study, published in Teaching Education, with 40 second- and third-year teachers, and interviewed 15 more second- and third-year teachers from another Canadian province. Using a semi-structured interview procedure with a method of thematic analysis, the same 2015 themes emerged in the new study with the exception of two original themes: It’s the kids; and An opportunity for relief: Relational support. Both new themes highlighted relational aspects of sustainability and turned us to the notion of relational agency. We draw on the conception of relational agency to inquire into how early career teachers might establish a capacity to align their thoughts and actions with others on the professional knowledge landscape. We then pose questions surrounding how relational agency helps teacher educators, administrators, and teachers to think differently about how early career teachers might be sustained in teaching.

Do educational practitioners invest in specialised discourses of autism? Professional knowledge landscapes of teachers and teaching assistants in mainstream schools

A key metaphor used to describe the complexity of what teachers do is that of professional knowledge landscapes. This conveys the idea that effective practice should be explored in relation to how teachers perceive pupils, but also to how teachers see themselves and questions of professional identity. The research reported here was part of a larger study into inclusive pedagogy for autistic pupils. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was applied to transcripts of semi‐structured interviews with mainstream practitioners (n = 8) to identify constructions about practice. Findings show that specialised knowledge about autism was welcomed, but effective practice was seen to be based wholly on ongoing interactions with pupils and did not differ from practices used with other pupils. Findings from this research contest the idea that mainstream practitioners simply fall short in adopting certain practices for autistic pupils and indicate they have practices of their own which are aligned with ideas about inclusive education.

Exploring knowledge landscapes: A narrative inquiry of midwives’ experiences of working in diverse settings in Ghana

Objective: This paper focuses on exploring the experiences of midwives in Ghana who have worked in diverse settings over time. It explores how midwives’ personal experiences across time, place and in diverse contexts impact their care for women during childbirth. The paper describes the forms of knowledge held by midwives. It presents how the experiences of midwives reflect their professional and personal practical knowledge landscape.Methods: Using narrative inquiry, the experiences of four midwives working in private maternity homes were explored. Being guided by the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space of temporality, sociality and place, and the concept of relational ethics, a meaningful relationship was built with participants over a period of five months. Several tape-recorded conversations were held with each participant, multiple other interactions were recorded as field notes and in a journal. Each tape-recorded conversation was transcribed and used to construct narrative accounts that reflected participants’ experiences as lived and told. Interim narrative accounts were shared with participants to ensure that the accounts reflected their experiences. Analysis: To identify resonant threads across all four narrative accounts, each account was read multiple times with intentionality and with the research objectives in mind.Results: Three distinct professional knowledge landscapes for midwives were identified. These were the professional knowledge landscape of working in rural communities, urban communities, and private maternity homes. Two concepts of knowledge: knowledge for midwives and midwives’ knowledge, were identified on each of these professional knowledge landscapes.Conclusions: Education of midwives should consciously take into consideration the different knowledge landscapes in which midwives in Ghana practice.

Sustaining teachers’ stories to live by: implications for teacher education

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we focus on questions around who we are as teacher educators as well as our responsibilities in helping pre-service teachers compose forward-looking stories as they prepare to begin teaching. We draw on the results of two studies in this paper: one a semi-structured interview study with 55 second- and third-year teachers in two Canadian provinces and one narrative inquiry into the experiences of early career teacher leavers. These studies showed how early career teachers’ stories to live by fuel their desires to become teachers. Teaching was a way to try to live out and sustain their stories to live by, that is, participants continued to live out their stories to live by shaped in early personal knowledge landscapes and embodied in their personal practical knowledge. We also learned that when teachers could not sustain their stories in the professional knowledge landscapes, their stories to live by shifted to stories to leave by, and they left teaching.

Professional Knowledge Landscapes in Online Pre-service Teacher Education: An Exploration through Metaphor

This paper explores metaphors as a process of professional learning, and as a research method to interrogate professional knowledge landscapes (PKLs) within the flexible space and time of online pre-service teacher education. The methodology comprised five pre-service teacher educators with different disciplinary areas of responsibility engaging in metaphorical analysis of our teaching work. We found that the metaphors that frame our e-pedagogy are multiple, reflecting a range of theoretical positions and objects of our teaching work, sometimes internally contradictory notions of education and e-learning, and the complexities of our individual and collective PKLs. We argue that it is crucial in the context of pre-service teacher education to explicitly examine our own metaphors and reflect on the ways that our metaphors might influence pre-service teachers' subsequent teaching practice. In addition, teacher educators can exploit the spatio/temporal freedom afforded by the porous border between the inside of our online environments and their outside worlds to consciously and deliberately consider the metaphors that they adopt to inform their pedagogical choices, and avoid uncritically perpetuating problematic metaphors of teaching practice.

Professional Knowledge Landscapes in Online Pre-service Teacher Education: An Exploration through Metaphor

Professional Knowledge Landscapes in Online Pre-service Teacher Education: An Exploration through Metaphor

Disseminating Secret-Story-Knowledge through the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices

ABSTRACTThis article is inspired simultaneously by the metaphor of professional knowledge landscapes and our experiences of the transformative potential of self-study methodology. We argue for the unique potential of self-study research, as a means not only for teacher educators to develop their pedagogy, but also to leave the mark of their experiences on the inhospitable terrain of teacher education reform. Central to our argument is our conceptual re-visioning of the professional knowledge landscape such that teacher educators’ knowledge of practice, typically contained in their “secret stories” of practice, comes to occupy a more public and prominent position on the landscape through self-study research. Locating our work within the Australian teacher education context, we highlight the ways in which current policy initiatives are redefining the work of teacher educators, and increasing the marginalization of teacher educators’ own perspectives and voices in the (re)production of knowledge about teaching. We offer a challenge to teacher educators to publicly participate in articulating and sharing their professional knowledge of practice through self-study.

Considering Authority and Authorship in Technological Contexts in a Brazilian School


 
 
 In this narrative inquiry, we inquired into the experiences of Everton and Lowise, two grade 6 English as a Foreign Language students in Brazil, using digital technologies and authoring their texts, in English. In the areas of Applied Linguistics and Education, we consider discussions about the writing process in English and the possibilities of working with genres to teach and learn English through digital technologies. The research participants lived and told stories of freedom, singularity, and responsibility, becoming authors when they left their signature on the professional knowledge landscape of school.
 
 

Negotiating the teaching of history in times of curriculum reform: the narrative accounts of four Australian primary teachers

AbstractThis research investigates the understandings of four teachers who teach history in primary and early childhood settings. Data were gathered from participants through semi‐structured interviews. The participants were experienced teachers who were in the process of curriculum change – from teachers of studies of society and environment to teachers of history, under the auspices of the Australian Curriculum: History. The focus of the study was on their understandings of content knowledge and the pedagogies involved in classroom teaching, using a pedagogical framework, which sought to identify and categorise the nature of their knowledge base in the implementation phase of the Australian Curriculum: History. The study used narrative inquiry to show how temporality, sociality, and place play out in the lives of these teachers of history. The findings from this study indicate the challenges and opportunities for teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes in times of curriculum reform. Whilst there are a small number of participants in this study, their stories provide insight into how teachers responded to the challenges and opportunities of teaching history and how these teachers have shaped the implementation of the history curriculum.

Stories to live by on the professional knowledge landscape

Stories to live by on the professional knowledge landscape

Sacred and secret stories in professional knowledge landscapes: learner agency in teacher professional learning

Set in a schooling practitioner research context, this article critiques instrumental forms of teacher professional development. An account of teacher professional learning and development is provided, as an inter-relational construct, where teachers reflect on practice to inquire into their students’ learning and foster their own and others specific interests and talents in creative ways. In an Aotearoa/New Zealand context, teachers are mandated to inquire into what their students need to know and understand, the strategies required for teachers to attain these learning goals, and how effective the approach implemented is in enhancing student learning. Emerging from qualitative case study research, a teacher’s narrative account of a student-initiated critical thinking episode in a secondary science classroom is analysed to demonstrate sacred, secret and cover stories of professional knowledge landscapes. Findings highlight the importance of agentic teacher-enacted forms of practitioner inquiry that support critical and collaborative reflective practice.

A narrative inquiry into the experience of negotiating the dominant stories of physical education: living, telling, re-telling and re-living

This paper explores the tensions that surfaced as a teacher of physical education (PE) shifted his ‘stories to live by’ [Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1999). Storying and restorying ourselves: Narrative and reflection. In A. Y. Chen & J. Van Maanen (Eds.), The reflective spin: Case studies of teachers in higher education transforming action (pp. 15–23). Singapore: World Scientific] around PE. The tensions became explicit when his shifting ‘stories to live by’ bumped against dominant narratives of PE that shaped his professional knowledge landscape. Our inquiry is framed by Dewey's pragmatic ontology [(1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Collier Books] and Clandinin and Connelly's [(1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press] narrative conception of experience as the living and telling, re-telling and re-living, of stories of experience. We also draw on Connelly and Clandinin's [(1999). Storied identities: Storied landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press] narrative conception of identity as ‘stories to live by’ which is an embodied, fluid and context-dependent view of identity as situated at the interface between personal practical knowledge and professional knowledge landscapes. We begin with situating this work within the broader spectrum of narrative research. We then describe the relational processes of re-telling the stories through narrative inquiry and finally explore the re-living of these stories in order to show the tensions that surfaced as Ashley's ‘stories to live by’ shifted. We engage in the narrative inquiry process of re-telling using the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space (with dimensions of place, sociality, temporality), to show tensions and shifting identities. We conceptualize these tensions as moments of autobiographical revisions [Carr, D. (1986). Time narrative and history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press]. These revisions are seen as a part of a person's struggle for narrative coherence; a struggle to compose a life in the professional knowledge landscape that is meaningful to each individual. In these moments of autobiographical revision we show the reflexive relationship between living, telling, re-telling and re-living of stories. We end by considering what we have learned about our own stories to live by through this process and theoretically and practically suggest ways other teacher educators and physical educators might benefit from engaging in narrative inquiry work.

Stories to live by on the professional knowledge landscape

In this article I want to talk about some work I have been doing with a group of colleagues at universities and in schools over the past 20 years or so. It is work that explores questions of teacher knowledge, what it means t o come to know as teachers and how our knowing as teachers is shaped by the landscapes on which we come to know as teachers and the landscapes o n which we now teach. I will try and make connections between what is commonly called, in Canada and the United States and here in New Zealand, standards and competencies in teacher education and some of our work.

Social Workers' Narratives of Integrating Mindfulness into Practice

Mindfulness is increasingly important as a professional intervention in social work; however, little is known about how practitioners integrate a practice of eastern origins into a western context. To explore the integration of mindfulness in social work, we collected written stories from social workers who participated in two workshops in regional Australia. The participants developed their own individual written narratives about their understanding of and experience in using mindfulness, and contributed these to a larger group discussion. We identified four scenarios/plotlines within the collected stories and ‘restoried’ four examples of the participants' written narratives. The stories reveal that participants experience little dissonance when integrating mindfulness into their personal lives, but the process of incorporating it into their practice requires a complex negotiation between the participant's story of themselves as a practitioner of mindfulness, their ‘professional story’, stories of themselves as social workers and the story of social work in their professional knowledge landscape.

Learning to Co-compose Curriculum with Youth

In this paper we trace the experiences of a teacher, Viviane, as she learns to co-compose curriculum alongside a youth. The conceptualizations of personal practical knowledge, personal and professional knowledge landscapes, familial and school curriculum making, and stories to live by shape our narrative understanding of curriculum making as relational work attentive to the making of a life for a youth in school, and her teacher. Our paper also takes up a second phenomenon, which explores our coming to a conceptual understanding of curriculum making in practice as a narrative act for a teacher and a teacher educator.