Chapter 1: Intersecting Lives and Identities: Shaping Service-Learning Spaces for Preservice Teachers to Experience and Learn About Diversity

This chapter is grounded in a narrative conceptualization of personal practical knowledge, knowledge landscapes, and identities as stories to live by (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). It is based on a narrative inquiry in which I used communitybased service-learning sites as contextual spaces to inquire, with four preservice teachers, into their shifting understandings of who they were and were becoming in relation with children of diversity. I highlight one participant’s (Monique) story as it was told, interrupted and retold to illustrate how her personal practical knowledge of diversity was dispositioned (Vinz, 1997) when her stories to live by intersected with the unfamiliar ones of children she came to know while volunteering in an after-school youth club. As Monique inquired, alongside the other participants and me, into the tensions (curricular moments) created by these interruptions, she came to understand how her personal practical knowledge of diversity had been shaped and could be reconsidered and reshaped in the light of new experiences. She began to recompose and relive a new story of herself in relation with diversity.