Place narratives of school: Inquiring into the storied experiences of staff and students

Staff and students’ stories of the spaces of schools, what I call place narratives, are an essential part in understanding how schools impact teaching and learning experiences. This study builds on existing research on critical spatial perspectives of schools to conceptualize staff and student place narratives of schools as a mode of thinking about the impact of school spaces on schooling experiences. Utilizing narrative inquiry interviews, this research explores the ways in which teachers and students represent their individual schooling experiences through the lens of place, and the ways in which their representations offer valuable epistemologies into how daily school participants negotiate the spaces of school in relationship to their own identity and the identity of others. The study asked of both staff and students respectively: (1) How do staff and students narrate their schooling experiences within the place of SchoolWorks? What spaces and experiences do they highlight and which spaces do they ignore? (2) How do staff and student place narratives of school show the ways they are constructing schooling identities? Staff and student place narratives of SchoolWorks, a small, alternative urban high school in which former out-of-school youth come for one year to earn their high school diploma and a vocational certificate, reveal the epistemological importance of looking beyond classroom interactions in schools in order to see the agentive roles staff and students play in occupying and reconstructing the spaces of school