Home | Themes | Workshops | Schedule | Registration | Location & Accommodations

Voice and Vision in Language Teacher Education:

2005 Conference on Language Teacher Education

This presentation draws on three interconnected narrative views: a narrative view of teacher knowledge as experiential, embodied, emotional, moral, practical and personal; a view of teacher knowledge as composed and recomposed as teachers live out their lives in and out of school; and a view of teacher education as being a possible place for sustained narrative inquiry into teachers' lives and the lives of students with whom they work. Working from an understanding that teachers' lives are central to the curriculum of teacher education, the presentation outlines how teachers embody their life stories, stories lived but rarely told in the sense of creating narrative texts that are unfolding accounts of their lives. Because teacher education is seen as a process of learning to tell and retell educational stories of teachers and students, these narrative views acknowledge the need to make spaces for story telling, response and story retelling as teachers engage with themselves and each other in inquiries into their stories. Teacher education is a sustained conversation in which teachers need many diverse responses to their stories in order to be able to retell and relive them with added possibility. Using experiences from more then 20 years of engaging with teachers in university courses and pre-service programs as well as in research, Jean Clandinin shows how she engages in creating these spaces for narrative inquiry in her work with teachers in pre-service and graduate classes at the university and in schools.

Jean Clandinin

Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta

D. Jean Clandinin is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta. She is a former teacher, counselor, and psychologist. She is co-author with Michael Connelly of four books and many chapters and articles. Their most recent book, Narrative Inquiry, was published in 2000. She has also authored two other books; the first one was based on her doctoral research and the second was based on research from an experimental teacher education program. She is currently co-authoring a book on several years of her research with children and teachers in inner city schools. She is part of an ongoing inquiry into teacher knowledge and teachers' professional knowledge landscapes. She is past Vice President of Division B of AERA and is the 1993 winner of AERA's Early Career Award. She is the 1999 winner of the Canadian Education Association Whitworth Award for educational research. She was awarded the Division B Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 from AERA. She is a 2001 winner of the Kaplan Research Achievement Award, the University of Alberta's highest award for research and a 2004 Killam Scholar at the University of Alberta.