51: Exploring the Narrative Unfolding of Self Across Time and Place

In this paper, I tell stories from both my childhood and teaching landscapes, exploring the multiple places of crossing intersecting my personal and professional experiences. By attending to these stories, I am able to see, more closely, how my identity, or “stories to live by” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) have been composed and recomposed across time and place. Within this narrative unfolding, I illuminate contrasting stories of distance and relation on my school landscapes, revealing the contradictions, dilemmas, borders, openings, and possibilities these stories present as they intersect with my living of childhood stories of self and other in relation. Yearning for similar relational spaces on my school landscapes, spaces where my self, and the selves of others, are free to shift and grow in their multiplicity, awakens me to the necessity of embracing places of crossing in which difference is not only revealed, but embraced.