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.

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.

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.

This volume constitutes a unique contribution to the literature on literacy and culture in several respects. It links together aspects of social variation that have not often been thus juxtaposed: ethnicity/nationality, gender, and participant role relations. The unifying theme of this collection of papers is that all of these factors are aspects of writers' identities -- identities which are simultaneously expressed and constructed in text. The topic of social identity and writing can be approached from a variety of scholarly avenues, including humanistic, critical, and historical perspectives. The papers in the present volume make reference to and contribute to such humanistic perspectives; however, this book lies squarely within the tradition of social science. It draws primarily upon the disciplines of linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, and education studies. The constituent topics of social identity, style, and writing themselves lie at the intersections of several related fields of scholarship. Writing remains of peak interest to educators from many fields, and is still a "hot" topic. The instructional ramifications of the particular issues addressed in this volume are of vital concern to educational systems adjusting to the realities of our multicultural society. This publication, therefore, should attract a substantial and diverse readership of scholars, educators, and policymakers affiliated with many fields including applied linguistics, composition and rhetoric, communication studies, dialect studies, discourse analysis, English composition, English/language arts education, ethnic studies, language behavior, literacy, sociolinguistics, stylistics, women's studies, and writing research and instruction.

Illustrates interim narrative field texts of identity as teacher educator stories and demonstrates how researchers utilize common places of temporality, sociality, and place in analyzing narratives. This title describes conceptualizations of narrative research processes, bringing forward narrative tools and methods of layering narratives.

Long recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA, the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA, with A Stranger's Journey, David Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as James Baldwin, ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Garrett Hongo, while making compelling connections to Mura's own life and work as a Japanese American writer. In A Stranger's Journey, Mura poses two central questions. The first involves identity: How is writing an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy. Here, like Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark or Jeff Chang's Who We Be, A Stranger's Journey breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and culture. The book's second central question involves structure: How does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative tools that any writer may use, taking in techniques from fiction, screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir and how questions of identity occupy a central place in contemporary memoir.

How do children determine which identity becomes paramount as they grow into adolescence and early adulthood? Which identity results in patterns of behaviour as they develop? To whom or to which group do they feel a sense of belonging? How might children, adolescents and young adults negotiate the gap between their own sense of identity and the values promoted by external influences? The contributors explore the impact of globalization and pluralism on the way most children and adolescents grow into early adulthood. They look at the influences of media and technology that can be felt within the living spaces of their homes, competing with the religious and cultural influences of family and community, and consider the ways many children and adolescents have developed multiple and virtual identities which help them to respond to different circumstances and contexts. They discuss the ways that many children find themselves in a perpetual state of shifting identities without ever being firmly grounded in one, potentially leading to tension and confusion particularly when there is conflict between one identity and another. This can result in increased anxiety and diminished self-esteem. This book explores how parents, educators and social and health workers might have a raised awareness of the issues generated by plural identities and the overpowering human need to belong so that they can address associated issues and nurture a sense of wholeness in children and adolescents as they grow into early adulthood.