Abstract:

This paper, influenced by another project that is taking place at the University of Barcelona (EDU2016-77576-P), focuses on how a Canadian kindergarten teacher, in attending children’s ways of knowing, creates educational spaces where each child is able to build their own curriculum. In this sense, the overall research purpose was to explore the teaching stories and experiences of a kindergarten teacher as she co-made a curriculum of care with children.

Given our interest in discovering the teaching stories and experiences of a kindergarten teacher as she co-made a curriculum of care with children over the course of a schooling year, we developed a two-year narrative inquiry study. Under the approach of narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2013; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), the study was informed through a range of field texts (narrative beginnings, researcher notes during the observation period, found poems and art works), informal conversations with families and children, ten in-depth conversations with the Canadian kindergarten teacher, and interim research texts. Narrative inquiry is the study of experience as story, where experience is considered as relational, continuous, personal, and social. It requires a way of thinking about experience and it entails a view of the phenomenon. This methodology conceded us to study experience that draws on the relational aspects of the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. Taking into account these dimensions, and thinking narratively with the teacher and children’ stories, the study opened ways to explore not only children’s ways of knowing but to deepen understanding in the curriculum of care co-composed in the classroom. As the study was developed, there was a need to come back to the earliest uses of children's ways of knowing and curriculum making. Recalling Dewey (1938), Bobbit (1924), Cremin (1971) and Contreras (2010), helped us to attend to the stories that resonated with a more holistic perspective.

The narrative account co-composed with the kindergarten teacher illustrated how curriculum of care was not as a notion, but an experience that, as children showed through informal conversations and games, evolved into a lived curriculum of belonging. Connecting each of these aspects, also informed the notion of narrative inquiry as a relational methodology. A methodology that embraces a reciprocal ethical and caring commitments with those I have come alongside in the study.

The obtained results were framed in four sections:
a) children’s stories and ways of knowing as the foundation of the educational act;
b) curriculum of care making as a responsive curriculum making in the children’s learning process;
c) the children as a co-composers of their own paths in early childhood education; and
d) tension-filled narratives among children’s ways of knowing in the co-composed process.

The transcribed conversations with the participant pointed out that stories were what kept the teacher able to go on with making a learning process (and a life) in ways that were meaningful for her. In this sense, being careful with and about the stories, became a pedagogical quality of the process of discovering and acknowledging children’s ways of knowing. In this sense, the paper also includes a perspective on the need for these understandings to become woven into Teacher Education programs as a way to enhance the early childhood landscape.

Keywords:

curriculum making, early childhood, stories, teacher education, narrative inquiry.