Making curriculum of lives: Living a story of critical literacy

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to retell the narratives of a preservice teacher and a teacher educator as they lived a story of critical literacy and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives.

Approach – The chapter presents a year-long narrative inquiry centered on the revisioning of curriculum for an undergraduate literacy course for preservice teachers.

Findings – The researcher broadened her understanding of teacher and teacher educators as curriculum makers to include preservice teachers as curriculum makers. As preservice teachers in the literacy course were invited to reflect on their own literacy backgrounds, several crucial narratives emerged that shaped new understandings for the researcher/teacher educator and drew her into her own curriculum-making with moral purpose. One preservice teacher began a journey of narrative authority and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives in a subsequent field experience, even through the mire of political pressure in schools.

Research implications – The preservice teacher's retelling featured children who discovered newfound understandings of social justice through literary ways of knowing and critical literacy events. She developed new understandings of how to help public school students value and define their literacies and their life events, all of which folded back into the undergraduate literacy course.

Value – Teacher educators can be encouraged to walk in relationship with their preservice teachers, valuing human experiences and lives as curriculum rather than relenting to top-down, politically driven, outside curriculum.

Citation

Keyes, D.K. (2011), "Making curriculum of lives: Living a story of critical literacy", Kitchen, J., Ciuffetelli Parker, D. and Pushor, D. (Ed.) Narrative Inquiries into Curriculum Making in Teacher Education (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 239-260. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3687(2011)00000130015