On Working from Within: Understanding Self and Story

Curriculum theory explores teaching and learning both in and out of schools. This research continues to engage with teachers and students as complex individuals whose identities and experiences influence their education and their approaches to teaching and learning. This research examines questions of self and story using autobiographical and autoethnographic methods. The project begins with an overview of some of the challenges public education and teachers have met with in the past two decades. One outcome of those challenges is control of the curriculum and classroom time has increasingly been taken away from students and teachers and given to administrators and outside interests including elected officials and corporations. The role that crisis narratives and stories of teacher incompetence have played in facilitating the erosion of trust in public education and public educators is also included in this study. Each chapter engages with elements of self and story that must be questioned and engaged with by educators and activists to imagine and construct different futures for students and teachers both in and out of school settings. Issues discussed in relation to story and self, include place and regional identity, memory, trauma, writing as research and activism, teaching, and the call to be public intellectuals who tell stories that promote democratic faith