Both Are Aunts: In-Classroom Relationships for Moving Toward Community in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: 56.062 - Counterstories and Communities in Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

This paper inquires into the potential for community making in the relationship negotiated by a beginning teacher and a teaching assistant in Chile. As community is always in the making (Dewey, 1938; Greene, 1993), we understand relationships between people as shifting, and as holding possibility for shaping safe spaces for inquiry into the meeting of lives in school. In this way, relationships shaped in classrooms hold potential for shaping ripples that could move outward across a school landscape. We draw on these possibilities to open conversation about plurality within communities, both in the relational environment experienced between BEd students and teacher educators during teacher education, and ways that relationships between teachers, children, and families are emphasized in teacher education coursework.

Authors

• Ilich Silva-Pena, Arturo Prat University

• Lynnette M. Driedger-Enns, Prairie Spirit School Division No. 206

• Janice Huber, University of Alberta