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      Teachers’ mo(u)rning stories: A living narrative inquiry into teachers’ identities on emergent high school inquiry landscapes

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      RIFFEL-THESIS.pdf (1.626Mb)
      Date
      2013-08-27
      Author
      Riffel, Kevin
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      This particular telling and retelling from a living narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) into the early experiences of three high school science teachers – Beth, Joel, and Christina – explores the emergent inquiry landscapes constructed as we implemented a renewed, decolonizing, science curriculum in Saskatchewan founded on a philosophy of inquiry and on a broader, more holistic definition of scientific literacy, both Western and Indigenous. This inquiry draws on an ontology of lived experience (Dewey, 1938) and, more subtly, on the borderland of narrative inquiry and complexity science in order to illustrate the emergence and coming to knowing (Delandshire, 2002; Ermine, as cited in Aikenhead, 2002) of our identities in a way that avoids the reduction in complexity of our experiences. While my initial wonders persisted throughout the research as I lived alongside Beth, Joel, and Christina for two years, they diffracted into the contextualized wonder: how do we share a philosophy of inquiry with each other and with our students? As such, this inquiry is a sharing about our own identities, about our own agency, about identity work, and about which experiences we choose to (re)engage with as we attempt to (re)find the narrative diversity, both individual and collective, necessary to shift from enacted identities to 'wished-we-could-enact' identities. This exploration of our 'mo(u)rning stories', early experiences from our shifting identities after stepping through the liminal and onto emergent inquiry landscapes, or our 'stories to relive with' provides a language and context to our shifting identities and hence, to science education, as we move towards a more holistic and humanistic form of scientific literacy for all our students. What emerged through the enmeshing of our landscapes and through the construction of voids in existing practices, followed by deformalizations in assessment and planning, was the development of a way of sharing our philosophy of inquiry and hence, our shifting identities. The artifacting and sharing of our contextualized inquiry experiences highlighted the rich assessment making, and curriculum making experiences (Huber, Murphy & Clandinin, 2011) we shared with our students and highlighted a view of assessment as a relationship. As we told and retold our stories to relive with, our identities shifted towards those more akin to facilitator and anthropologist and away from sage and engineer/architect.
      Degree
      Master of Education (M.Ed.)
      Department
      Curriculum Studies
      Program
      Curriculum Studies
      Supervisor
      McVittie, Janet
      Committee
      Murphy, Shaun; Aikenhead, Glen
      Copyright Date
      August 2013
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/ETD-2013-08-1154
      Subject
      science education
      narrative inquiry
      inquiry
      curriculum renewal
      assessment
      identity
      teacher identity
      decolonizing
      scientific literacy
      complexity
      complexity science
      borderland
      agency
      narrative diversity
      contextualized inquiry experience
      stories to relive with
      mo(u)rning stories
      holistic
      humanistic
      wished-we-could-enact identities
      emergence
      deformalizations
      professional development
      reductionism
      modernity
      positivism
      coming to knowing
      post-modern
      postmodern
      Indigenous
      First Nations
      ontology
      lived experience
      narrative coherence
      complexity reduction
      artifacting
      assessment making experiences
      curriculum making experiences
      assessment as a relationship
      liminality
      liminal
      assessment for learning
      assessment for inquiry’
      Collections
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations

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