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The world of work is shifting from traditional career paths, to relentless change, leaner structures, evolving roles and a need to find meaning through the work the author do. A new skill-set is required to survive and thrive in the new economy. The purpose of this paper is to explore how learning programs focused on personal and career empowerment can build these skills, increase engagement, enhance performance and impact culture positively.

The paper summarises these new skill-sets required and raises critical questions: how do we create an environment for self and career empowerment? How do we act as catalysts for cultural and social transformation? It then outlines an approach to discovering the answers based on experiences facilitating I am Talent workshops for personal and career empowerment. Key insights and suggestions for personal and career empowerment topics and tools are highlighted.

The paper goes on to share the post-intervention impact results of a case study organisation, on culture, engagement, learning and performance.

The paper covers some practical skill areas that can significantly improve work and life results, in a world that is dynamic, uncertain and continuously changing.

Millennials come with whole new set of expectations and preferences in the way they interact with work. In a South African context, this is compounded by our educational and skills crisis resulting in many work entrants not being sufficiently prepared for the new world of work.

The learning programme is based on a book, I am Talent, by the author of this paper and is a unique approach to building personal and career empowerment.

October 10^th, 2010

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to trace the origins of narrative inquiry as an empirical research method specifically created to examine how teachers come to know in their own terms.

Approach – The chapter reviews key conceptualizations in the teaching and teacher education field chronologically.

Findings – The review begins with Clandinin and Connelly's groundbreaking work concerning teachers’ personal practical knowledge, the professional knowledge landscapes of schools, and stories to live by (teacher identity). Three other important narrative conceptualizations on the research line are then highlighted: narrative resonance, narrative authority, and knowledge communities. Special attention is also paid to how narrative inquiry has fueled studies having to do with curriculum, subject matter, and culture. Narrative inquiry's important contributions to the emergence of the self-study of teaching and teacher education practices genre of research is additionally highlighted, along with several more recent advances having to do with collaborative narrative inquiries, studies with children, and reforming school landscapes.

Research implications – Lingering issues relating to narrative inquiry's acceptance as a legitimate research approach are also discussed; latent opportunities are likewise paid attention.

Value – The value of the chapter is that it is the first work that has specifically followed developments on the Connelly–Clandinin research line. The chapter shows the major contributions that the world-class research program – and the associated research projects spawned from it – have made to teaching and teacher education internationally.

This is a book for teacher educators. It is also a book for teacher candidates and educational stakeholders who are interested in using storied practice in teacher education. It is about teacher educators and teacher candidates as curriculum makers (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992) who engage in narrative inquiry practice. As editors of this volume, we came to this important writing project as a result of our respective work using narrative inquiry that originated from our studies with Dr. Michael Connelly and Dr. Jean Clandinin. In a large sense, this book represents our interpretations, as second-generation narrative inquirers, of three main ideas: narrative inquiry, curriculum making, and teacher education. Narrative inquiry, curriculum making, and teacher education are vitally interconnected concepts that offer an alternative way of understanding the current landscape of education. Narrative inquiry in teacher education would not have been possible without the groundbreaking work of Connelly and Clandinin.

This chapter restates the purpose of the three-volume series and discusses themes that reoccur in chapters and sections of Part B, which first appeared in chapters and sections of Part A of the series. While Part A of the three-book set focused on pedagogies of teacher selection, reflection, narrative ways of knowing, identity, and mentoring and mediation, Part B of the three-volume series centers on pedagogies of preservice teacher leadership, diversity, parents and family, social justice, and technology. Ideas having to do with traveling stories, the theory-practice split, and the praxical nature of pedagogies are taken up. To conclude, the model for traveling pedagogies, which was first proposed in Part A of the series, once again appears, with a few sub-themes added from International Teacher Education (Part B), which support the already identified framework in International Teacher Education (Part A).

This is the book many of us need and have been waiting for. Graduate studies are a transformative educational experience in teacher's lives. Exhausted teachers sitting down for an evening's master's level course after a day of teaching often say they are rejuvenated by the opportunity to reflect on their hectic days. Doctoral graduates often speak of their doctoral programs as intellectually life changing. In the idiom of this book, doctoral graduates feel they have retold a story of themselves as educators. But, inevitably, the real test begins. How to relive this retold story as many take up the role of teacher educator. Their students' journeys are altogether different than their own transformative journey through graduate school. Their students are under pressure to successfully take up the job of school teacher. Their landscape of teaching and learning is altogether unlike the professional development landscape of experienced teachers, and it is altogether unlike the teaching/learning landscape of university level graduate studies. As newly minted graduates with a new teacher education job at hand realize, what to do with one's retold story is a puzzle. They ask, “How can I use narrative inquiry in my teacher education classes? No one else is teaching it in my faculty and all the courses seem to be about content and teaching method.” Depending on circumstances, some add “What do I do about the new school policies that I really don't understand but which don't seem to fit what I'm thinking?” What seemed so transformative in graduate school now seems to present a mountainous hurdle. It is a hurdle in the sense that this is the moment to begin reliving the retold story.

Families conduct their affairs through processes that are built upon those of previous generations and also social capacities such as culture, class, oppression and poverty. The media has played a part in stereotyping the lower classes through their portrayal on the television programmes such as Benefits Street and Jeremy Kyle and tabloid newspaper stories. This chapter is a case study of two families who are at the opposing ends of the social scale, the Horrobin/Carter and Aldridge families. The two families were chosen due to them being linked by marriage in the younger generation. Through the use of genograms, we explore how the families differ in their attitudes towards relationships within their individual families, and also how they relate to each other as separate family groups. Despite the many differences, there are also a number of key similarities, particularly regarding the key females in the families, in terms of family background and snobbery. We also show that there is little family loyalty in the more privileged family and a power differential between the two families (oppressors vs. oppressed) in terms of the crimes committed.

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.