What Makes a Lifetime: Growing Teaching Practices With/In Communities

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Collaborative Narrative Research (Table 3)

Abstract

What makes a teacher? How does curriculum emerge? What are the foundations of authentic classroom community? In a time of scope, sequence, state standards, and scripted lessons, the orientation of teachers is often turned away from the actual people who inhabit the classrooms: the children and the teachers themselves. But what is that alternative? How might we frame teacher education and practice toward and through the individuals within the classroom? This narrative, auto-ethnographic study examines a non-traditional path into teaching. Through the experiences of one camp counselor and her classroom of young children, we explore the possibilities of building a curriculum, a democracy, a practice and a lifetime of teaching in collaboration with children, and all members of the community.

Author

• Dana Frantz Bentley, Buckingham Browne and Nichols School