Chapter 14: It Starts at Home: The Familial Relationship of Scholarship, Education, and Advocacy

Much of our research is born out of the personal or private realm of our lives and it takes place at an interesting intersection of the personal and the professional, the private and the public. Our research certainly represents questions we feel need to be answered; yet it also often originates from and leads us to positions of advocacy. This confluence necessitates a careful deconstruction and dismantling of the artificial dichotomy between the objective and the subjective, creating the space for authentic, passionate, participatory inquiry, such as that represented in this collection.

In my own life, like so many of us, I have multiple roles. In my professional life, I work in academe as a curriculum researcher and a teacher educator. In my personal life, as a mother of three children adopted as older children from the state of Indiana’s foster care system, I find myself functioning as an advocate, striving to meet the unique educational challenges presented by my children’s schooling experiences. My personal and professional lives have come to intersect through my research, where I bring my academic knowledge and my personal experiences to bear upon the dual questions: How is and how should the construct of family be represented within curriculum?