Coming to Narrative Conceptions of Teacher Knowledge

In this chapter we take a reflective turn to show how our work, lives, and stories as students, teachers, and researchers have brought us to wonder about teacher knowledge in our lives and in the lives of other teachers. Here we consider how we came to this work, how we came to, entered, and walked in a kind of metaphoric parade (Geertz, 1995) that has led us to our current puzzle about teacher knowledge in teachers’ lives. As narrative inquirers, we understand experience narratively and as unfolding and enfolding across three dimensions: temporality, sociality, and place. In our three narrative accounts that follow, we first focus on the stories of experiences that brought us to teaching in Kindergarten to Grade 12 schools, as well as on our experiences as we stepped away from teaching in the schools. We then shift to tell the stories of experience that shaped our understandings of, and wonders about, teacher knowledge. As Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) noted in their chapter in the Handbook of Narrative Inquiry, we do not assume to have access to a stance or position outside of the history of the development of narrative conceptions of teacher knowledge.