As top-down educational reform policies at local and national levels increasingly isolate teachers from their own professional and instructional agency, and stultify children’s passion for learning, new techniques are needed for understanding and transforming educational practices. Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School: Learning to Teach, Teaching Well facilitates meaningful change in early years education by providing early childhood and elementary school teachers with methods to incorporate narrative into their instruction and inquiry. This book offers practical strategies for incorporating narrative tools and structures into the classroom, and encouraging effective conceptual, pedagogical, and personal avenues for engaged teaching and learning across languages and cultures. The book’s chapters promote a lively discussion of central tenets of narrative inquiry and illustrative examples of teachers at work with narrative and inquiry for improving their practice and children’s learning.

Narrative research in contemporary times can free social scientists from the rhetorical forms (Emihovich, 1995) that alienate children and families from their own traditions. Through the use of narrative we are able to recognise the power of subjectivity in allowing open dialogue and co-construction of meaning. Becoming comfortable with narrative research also means accepting ideas that the world has no fixed rules for assigning behaviour (Emihovich, 1995). This means that open dialogue is required to build consensus around shared meaning and to ensure the inclusion of multiple voices. The book begins with a theoretical overview of narrative genre before focusing on narrative constellations. Three constellations are then shared with the reader. The final chapter provides ideas about the future of narrative constellation in research and the impact constellations can have for future policy and practice. It is hoped that the reader develops a better understanding of narrative ways and begins to see the potential of narrative constellations in the research genre. Dr Susanne Garvis is a professor of child and youth studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has previously worked in Australian universities and is an adjunct academic with Griffith University, Australia. Professor Garvis has experience with narrative approaches in early childhood education and care. She has researched the lives of teachers, families and children. She is particularly interested in representations of lived experience and the power of stories in research.

In a climate of increasing emphasis on testing, measurable outcomes, competition and efficiency, the real lives of children and their teachers are often neglected or are too messy and intricate to legislate and quantify. As such, curricula are designed without including the very people that compose the identities of schools. Here Clandinin takes issue with this tendency, bringing together a collection of narratives from seven writers who spent a year in an urban school, exploring the experiences and contributions of children, families, teachers and administrators. These stories show us an alternative way of attending to what counts in schools, shifting away from the school as a business model towards an idea of schools as places to engage citizenship and to attend to the wholeness of people’s lives. Articulating the complex ethical dilemmas and issues that face people and schools every day, this fascinating study puts school life under the microscope raises new questions about who and what education is for.

As top-down educational reform policies at local and national levels increasingly isolate teachers from their own professional and instructional agency, and stultify children’s passion for learning, new techniques are needed for understanding and transforming educational practices. Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School: Learning to Teach, Teaching Well facilitates meaningful change in early years education by providing early childhood and elementary school teachers with methods to incorporate narrative into their instruction and inquiry. This book offers practical strategies for incorporating narrative tools and structures into the classroom, and encouraging effective conceptual, pedagogical, and personal avenues for engaged teaching and learning across languages and cultures. The book’s chapters promote a lively discussion of central tenets of narrative inquiry and illustrative examples of teachers at work with narrative and inquiry for improving their practice and children’s learning.

Renowned scholar and founder of the practice of narrative inquiry, D. Jean Clandinin, and her coauthors provide researchers with the theoretical underpinnings and processes for conducting narrative inquiry with children and youth. Exploring the unique ability of narratives to elucidate the worldview of research subjects, the authors highlight the unique steps and issues of working with these special populations. The authors address key ethical issues of anonymity and confidentiality, the relational issues of co-composing field and research texts with subjects, and working within the familial contexts of children and youth; include numerous examples from the authors’ studies and others – many from indigenous communities-- to show narrative inquiry in action; should be invaluable to researchers in education, family relations, child development, and children’s health and services.

Collaboration, Narrative, and Inquiry that Honor the Complexity of Teacher Education presents a narrative exploration of three teacher educators' collaborative and transnational inquiry into their practices. Through carefully selected narratives, the authors describe how they enacted a practice-based approach in their teacher education courses. The authors present challenges and complexities they encountered as teacher educators in trying to prepare preservice teacher candidates for the realities of the classroom.

This book provides important insights into narratives and young children. It is structured to help others learn more about the importance of narrative approaches and early childhood education. The first section of the book explores the concept of narrative across the current research field. The second section explores a range of different narrative methods related to young children.