Freema Elbaz-Luwisch

In the tradition of educational narrative inquiry, this book explores diverse ways of thinking, writing and theorizing from auto/biographic experience, in language that is rooted in practice yet challenges the authoritative discourses of educational policy, theory and research. The book moves from first to third person accounts and from personal and family stories to narratives of teachers and teacher educators in the contested, multicultural environment of Israel. It highlights the multi-voiced, embodied lives of Israeli teachers from many cultures and identities and engages with literature around memory and embodiment, imagination, place and presence in teaching. The book will interest researchers in curriculum studies, teaching and teacher education, as well as scholars interested in issues of memory in historical and contemporary contexts.

In the tradition of educational narrative inquiry, this book explores diverse ways of thinking, writing and theorizing from auto/biographic experience, in language that is rooted in practice yet challenges the authoritative discourses of educational policy, theory and research. The book moves from first to third person accounts and from personal and family stories to narratives of teachers and teacher educators in the contested, multicultural environment of Israel. It highlights the multi-voiced, embodied lives of Israeli teachers from many cultures and identities and engages with literature around memory and embodiment, imagination, place and presence in teaching. The book will interest researchers in curriculum studies, teaching and teacher education, as well as scholars interested in issues of memory in historical and contemporary contexts.

The authors of this book – teachers of foundation courses to pre-service and in-service teachers in Canada, Israel, and the United States – use culturally heterogeneous settings as points of departure for inquiry and cross-cultural encounters of difference, and illuminate how, among people of differing ethnic, religious, socio-economic, political, ideological, and gendered backgrounds, the telling of experiential stories can shift personally and culturally polarized positions. Key in the work documented here is the encouragement of narrative rather than argumentative modes of expression: the instructors found inquiry more likely to stay alive when they were able to access and incorporate both the mutual interest of and the personal tensions between their students. The book illustrates how personal dynamics can subtly move individual inquiry forward, and help alleviate animosity and polarization.

This book draws on ideas about the nature of teaching and teacher knowledge, teacher development and school reform, and narrative as methodology for understanding the lives and work of teachers. These ideas have been elaborated over the past 20 years or so by many researchers who see storytelling as the interactive process, which constitutes the site of the production of teachers’ knowledge. Narrative research makes it possible to pay attention to the wider concerns that shape the work of teaching, looking at the whole lives of teachers and other educational practitioners, and exploring those lives as embedded in multiple contexts. Listening to teachers speak about whatever most concerns them in their work, it is not surprising that we hear a wide range of different voices not only from different teachers but within the speech of any one teacher. The purpose of this book is to reflect back to the field a multidimensional, multivoiced portrayal of teaching as it is, bringing our attention to both the complexity and the possibility inherent in the work of teachers. Approaching teaching in this way, as multivoiced, allows us to hear possibilities for change and development in the stories of teachers and classrooms.

This book draws on ideas about the nature of teaching and teacher knowledge, teacher development and school reform, and narrative as methodology for understanding the lives and work of teachers. These ideas have been elaborated over the past 20 years or so by many researchers who see storytelling as the interactive process, which constitutes the site of the production of teachers’ knowledge. Narrative research makes it possible to pay attention to the wider concerns that shape the work of teaching, looking at the whole lives of teachers and other educational practitioners, and exploring those lives as embedded in multiple contexts. Listening to teachers speak about whatever most concerns them in their work, it is not surprising that we hear a wide range of different voices not only from different teachers but within the speech of any one teacher. The purpose of this book is to reflect back to the field a multidimensional, multivoiced portrayal of teaching as it is, bringing our attention to both the complexity and the possibility inherent in the work of teachers. Approaching teaching in this way, as multivoiced, allows us to hear possibilities for change and development in the stories of teachers and classrooms.