Narrative, Pedagogy, History

• In Event: 34.023 - Curriculum History as Memory Work: Deterritorializing the Field

Abstract

This paper interrogates the ancient and often contemporary assumption that the purpose of education is educos, a process that brings youth out of the confines of clan and family into a larger community and discourse. It is provoked by concern about the ways that narratives of educational experience are solicited, interpreted and deployed in educational research and teacher education, and employs arguments of Mark Bracher (2009), author of Radical Pedaogogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation to challenge these projects.
Arguing that it is futile to abstract any educational agenda from its context, I briefly review the theories of narrative that emerged in the last decades of the 20th Century so that we can compare those projects to contemporary approaches to narrative in education. In Metaphors of Self, published in 1972, James Olney’s argument that autobiographical narratives provided a bridge between the private and the public, justified an expansion of history that would welcome individuality voiced in these accounts. Erik Erikson’s (1975) Life History and the Historical Moment also provided a rationale for the reciprocity of individual life stories with the narratives of history. The Civil Rights and Feminist movements that followed went further, deploying these individual narratives to shatter the complacency and hegemony of national and local histories.
It acknowledges the commitments to educational equity that inspired critical pedagogy and some interpretations of currere, but in examining narrative analysis in this moment, it calls for a more even handed specificity (in part inspired by George Saunders’ 7/11/16 long New Yorker essay on Donald Trump’s campaign and supporters.) In response to the compressed, exaggerated, and belligerent presentations of views and of the other that dominate our political discourse, I propose pedagogical opportunities provided by narrative analysis that do not pit autobiographical narratives against historical tropes, but using a phenomenological view, informed by the work of Mark Vagle (2014), that engage in pedagogical conversations that recognize the presence and dignity of multiple narratives and subjective improvisations in stories of self knowledge.

Author

• Madeleine Grumet, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill