Introduction

In this chapter, I consider aspects of curriculum as autobiographical text that support my view that at the heart of our work as curriculum scholars lies the important and sometimes difficult work of addressing our own autobiographical experience. In my teaching and research practices, narrative inquiry self-study provides a research and teaching venue that supports the unpacking of seminal experiences that inform and guide our definitions of curriculum.

In the various sections of this chapter, I describe how I use the frameworks provided by Pinar (1994, 1995, 2012) and Connelly and Clandinin (1988, 1990, 1995, 2000) that focus curriculum on autobiographical texts. Underlying these frameworks are definitions of curriculum that move far beyond the “course of study” thinking that is focused on subject matter alone. Connelly and Clandinin (1988) write:

Curriculum can become one’s life course of action. It can mean the paths we have followed and the paths we intend to follow. In this broad sense, curriculum can be viewed as a person’s life experience. (p. 1)

Pinar’s (1994) method of currere supports the exploration of personal experience, which,

discloses experience so that we may see more of it and see more clearly. With such seeing can come deepened understanding of the running [of the course] and with this can come deepened agency. (Pinar and Grumet 1976, p. vii, quoted in Pinar et al. 1995)

Underlying my curricular thinking throughout this chapter is the position that our past experiences direct and guide our interpretation of curriculum in the present and thus, as scholars, it is imperative that we come to know the roots of our own perceptions about what is important to promote in our curriculum theorizing and teaching. The goal of making present-day meaning of past experiences is to continue to deepen and extend our understanding of what we thought we knew, and to welcome new interpretations that enlarge the vision of curriculum that we can share with others.

Autobiographical Text as a Basis for Understanding Curriculum

Adopting the definitions of curriculum noted above during my years of doctoral study transformed my way of thinking about my students, my research and myself. Prior to those years, I taught in the field of special education, yet never made the important connection to my own life experience of growing up with a handicapped sibling. My focus was on amassing the “expert texts,” which I then shared with my students in education building theory and practice that was distant from myself. In coming to understand the significance of my own life experience on my teaching and learning, my move to thinking narratively as a primary source of knowledge has supported and sustained my adopting of curriculum as autobiographical text over the last twenty years.

In curricular terms, the methods outlined by Connelly and Clandinin (1994, 2000) and Pinar (1994, 1995, 2012) have provided the necessary frameworks for thinking and writing narratives of experience that I draw on as I inquire into the events and situations that inform my theorizing and practice as a teacher and researcher. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) write that there are,

four directions in any inquiry: inward and outward, backward and forward. By inward, we mean toward the internal conditions, such as feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions. By outward, we mean toward the existential conditions, that is, the environment. By backward and forward, we refer to temporality – past, present, and future. [In 1994], we wrote that to experience an experience is to experience it simultaneously in these four ways and to ask questions pointing each way. (p. 50)

In recounting a story, it is clear that we move in these directions quite naturally as we share events and situations with others.

Pinar’s (1994, 1995, 2011, 2012) framework for inquiring into personal experience is comprised of four stages: regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. Pinar (1994) writes that, “the method is the self-conscious conceptualization of the temporal … the viewing of what is conceptualized through time” (p. 19). As in the four-step process of narrative inquiry described by Clandinin and Connelly (2000), one crosses backward and forward through time in the first two stages, and one inquires into and analyses past experiences, synthesizing them in order to bring them forward to re-conceptualize them in the present in the last two stages. Pinar (1994) notes that this method “attends explicitly to the experience of knowledge creation, from the point of view of the subjectively-existing individual” (p. 61).

In both of these autobiographical frameworks, which are meant to be fluid in nature, re-interpretation of stories again at a later date is always a possibility. Individuals engage in their own process of re-writing life scripts and are empowered to think in new ways about past experience in the present. It then becomes possible to move forward with new vision with its inherent possibilities for action. In this way, curriculum is never static, but like life itself, is situated in the experiences we live across time and situations.

Autobiographical Text as a Place for Inquiry

Clandinin and Connelly (1995) have noted that, “stories are not icons to be learned but inquiries on which further inquiry takes place through their telling and through response to them. In this way, thinking again, relationship, and storytelling are interrelated” (p. 156). Adding to this perspective Ben Okri (1998, cited in King 2003) writes, “If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives” (p. 153).

As a narrative inquirer focused on autobiographical research, my work is centered on asking students to “think again”; to revisit and reconstruct stories from past experiences in present-day terms in order to inquire into the meanings held there—meanings that can help enlarge or change present-day thinking. Very often, I find that as individuals delve into past events and situations, they encounter iconic tales, often family stories or stories framed by those with cultural power like teachers that are so engrained into consciousness that they have not even been thought of as possibilities for inquiry.

I am not surprised at this perspective as I experienced this same revelation more than twenty years ago in a doctoral seminar when I shared with fellow graduate students some of the trauma held in my family story of life at home with my handicapped sister. This story was bigger than I was as most mythic family stories are, because family stories represent the collective story that subsumes and often silences each individual member’s tale. My sense of increased personal power upon shedding the unconscious weight of that family version of the story was equally mythic, as through that sharing of experience, I took my first big step toward reconstructing my own story of my sister and her impact on my personal and professional development across the years. I use the word “mythic” here following Eliade (1963), to mean “a story … that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, [and] significant” (p. 1). In my family story, my sister’s life was a sacred story, too significant to share with outside others. We had the account of her birth, and we lived with her numerous difficulties. In her difference, she was a precious possession to my parents. This story though was not my story.

In the stories of many of the individuals that I have worked with over the years, the sacredness of some stories waiting to be told is similarly of epic proportions and, too often, can hold the power to keep at bay a connection to a personally and professionally meaningful path to the future. It is at such a juncture that narrative inquiry self-study methods can offer an opening for inquiry into past situations and events that both support and challenge the stories that have been left unexamined in our lives. In my experience, the result is a gradual awakening to the fact that the more we share our stories with listening others, the less fearful our stories become and the less power they hold over us in our present-day thinking. We learn that our voice holds the power to not only find new meaning in our own story, but also some of the views that others who listen to our story hold as well.

Autobiographical Text as a Place for Recovering and Reconstructing Meaning

Connelly and Clandinin (1988) write:

When we tell [write] a story as descriptively as we can, we are recovering an important event [or situation] in our experience. It is when we ask ourselves the meaning of a story [in the present] and tell [write] it in a narrative, that we reconstruct the meaning recovered in the story. (p. 81)

In my teaching and graduate supervision practice, I apply this concept of inquiring into the meaningheld in stories of experience to self-study or autobiographical exploration using the two-step process of recoveringmeaning from the past and reconstructing that meaning in present day. To do so, I use multiple genres in writing and arts-based narratives that highlight new self-understanding that is uncovered in the act of re-interpreting the past.

First, the recovery of meaning step provides a vehicle for transporting us to stories remembered. It seems obvious to say that we must remember an event or situation before we can engage in any reconstruction, but memory is a crucial ingredient in this process. Timelines that place specific events and situations in an orderly fashion can be used as a first step for the purposes of recoveringmeaning. Dates and the events or situations that accompany them can be noted in point form along the timeline that can then be added to as other experiences are remembered. Depending on the focus being studied, seminal experiences can be made visible across time and can then be written in story form. I find that in the remembering process, “way leads unto way” and events and situations we have forgotten or tucked away in the back of our minds unfold before us in secondary and tertiary fashion attached in some way to our initial memory.

Second, the reconstruction of meaning process provides new perspectives on present and future living. It is not enough to remember the stories alone because then they remain as they were in the past. It is in the reconstruction process that we bring stories from the past forward in time, inquiring into the meaning we find there in the present—meaning we can then use to reinterpret past events and situations, using all the experience we have lived in the intervening years. And in that move across time and situation lies the power of curriculum as autobiographical text.

One example from my own writing during my doctoral studies that illustrates this two-step process was writing a story under the heading Lessons from a Teacher. I chose to write about a high school teacher who was belittling to students, who had little interest in the subject matter, and had favorites among my classmates. Her true stripes were revealed one day when, trying to get a better mark, I had copied an assignment from one of the favorite students word for word, and she received a perfect mark and I failed. Bringing this to her attention in class by asking how this could be, I was thoroughly chastised and told I was stupid, but the overall result was shock and distrust by the class. As I reconstructed this story so many years later, I thought about myself as the teacher I was and how important being caring and just was to me in relationships with my adult students. I realized the influence that teacher’s behavior had had on my impressionable teenage self all those years ago. I could see and name the teacher and person I never wanted to be in her actions.

Personal Methods for Supporting New Insights Through Storying Experience

There are many methods for awakening the self to new meaning inherent in stories of past experience. For many years, qualitative researchers have utilized methods such as keeping a personal journal to gather data, and using letters, photos, stories, poems, and interviews. Increasingly, new research is adding fiction, art installation, music, blogs, and a number of arts-based and arts-informed methods to share data in qualitative research (Knowles and Cole 2008). All of these methods are available for autobiographical researchers. Over the years, I have used many of these techniques in my graduate classes, modified them and made up new ones to help myself and my students connect personal and professional experience. In doing so, I keep in mind Dewey’s (1938) notion that we learn from “the particular”—singular events and situations, rather than from an array of experiences that cross time. I premise the methods I use on this theorizing and have found them invaluable for the reconstruction of the experience process that helps build new pedagogical understanding.

As a doctoral student, I was introduced to specific narrative writing activities such as the Lesson from a Teacher used in the previous section as an example of the recovery of meaning and reconstruction of meaning process. I have used them as methods consistently for many years now with students to help them construct and reconstruct their own stories of experience. I ask students to focus on one particular event, situation, and experience at a time and to write them using enough thick description (Glesne 2011) so that readers or listeners can place themselves inside the stories. They can be written in story or poetic form, illustrated, or in another form of their choice. We share these stories in class and I find they are often powerful and educative for individuals in tangible ways that they can name, and that open a door to new understanding and direction forward in their studies, work, and lives. I have captured these autobiographical methods using some of the following titles: A Childhood Story, Revelations Held in a Memory Box, A Lesson from a Teacher (who can be anyone who has taught a life lesson), A Personal Metaphor, Letter to a Mentor, Principles and Rules to Live By and a Letter Unsent.

I also introduce techniques from other authors and sometimes use them for assignment purposes. For example, Jack Maguire (1998) has added Family Storytelling, Lifelines and Storylines, Meeting Your Inner Storyteller, The Voice of Your Being, to my repertoire. Sabrina Ward Harrison (2004, 2005) models ways of representing experience utilizing arts-based techniques such as collage, mixed media, and illustration, and Carey et al. (2002) display an approach to keeping an artful journal using words, poems, and drawings. I use all of these techniques as methods in my graduate classes as a means of uncovering past experience. Clara Pickola Estes (1992) has provided two techniques that I have adapted for assignment purposes: one is called an Ofrenda, which I use as a way of constructing a tribute to the self in the past in words, objects, and artifacts. The other is called Descansos, which is a way of formally acknowledging and honoring past experiences that have been left unexamined where parts of us have been left behind and not yet mourned or reconstructed.

One assignment that students find powerful is one I tried by chance following a classroom discussion about finding ways to represent experience other than through language. I call it Representing the Self Without Words. Many art pieces, dioramas, and actual puzzles have been shared in classes where metaphors abound, helping to provide new insights and pathways for present and future direction in curricular learning.

All these methods focus on shifting the scripts of our lives, building awareness in the meta-cognitive realm so that skills such as self-reflection, self-questioning, self-awareness, self-consciousness are brought to the fore as we search through specific events and situations that mark places of importance in our pasts where our self-perception was impacted. All of these methods are open to various ways of representing experience—textual accounts, drawings, poetry, illustrations—and utilizing artifacts.

Autobiographical Text as a Primary Teaching Tool

In my role as instructor or supervisor, I set the milieu in which my students and I dwell as inquirers. I help students frame techniques for their inquiry and provide some examples, which I usually do by sharing my own work. I alert them to the three-dimensional inquiry space we enter as we engage with others in a re-storying process where the new meaning we construct emerges from attending to the voices of others as well as our own. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) name the three dimensions:

personal and social (interaction); past, present, future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation). This set of terms creates a metaphorical three-dimensional inquiry space, with temporality along one dimension, the personal and social along a second dimension, and place along a third. Using this set of terms, any particular inquiry is defined by this three dimensional space. (p. 50)

I also illustrate the fluid movement that the backward, forward, inward, outward motion of storytelling provides so that we naturally move in all of these directions when we share a story. Students quickly see this theorizing come to life in their work.

Along with everyone else, I listen attentively as narratives are shared, let silence settle over the group for thoughtful response and then, before the following class or meeting, provide written feedback, offering any questions, thoughts or insights I might have into situations or events being explored, and sharing experiences of my own to try to help extend or broaden re-interpretation of meaning on the part of students.

Each of the methods noted in the section above offers a broad canvas such that everyone can choose personal and/or professional experiences they are ready to share with others. I find that as individuals become comfortable sharing their stories, narratives chosen evolve to a deeper level and connections between personal and professional development become evident, much in the way that my own did when I shared my story of life with my sister in class so long ago.

In a professional life, the writing of stories remembered provides an opportunity to turn our gaze inward to re-connect with knowledge we have learned through experience. Such knowledge is often forgotten in our haste to engage in professional degrees and formal development and activities that focus us outward. The addition of speaking our stories opens us to the emotional dimension of experience, both our own and others’: We feel and express the impact that life has had on our choices and our direction, and listening to others translate our story to aspects of their own experience can join us in our particular journey.

Autobiographical Text Connects Self with Self and Self with Others

All these actions are premised on individuals sharing stories that as Bullough and Pinnegar (2001) note, “ring true and enable connection” (p. 16). That connection is focused on enabling individuals to understand that the roots of their professional lives are emotionally and experientially interwoven with their personal experience, and their actions and choices as professionals are often premised on their whole-life experience, not just their professional ones. Bullough and Pinnegar note:

As self-narrative, autobiography has a great deal in common with fiction. But as Graham argues, for autobiography to be powerful it must contain and articulate “nodal moment(s).” For self-study researchers these moments are central to teaching and learning to teach. Autobiography, like fiction, reveals to the reader a “pattern in experience” and allows a reinterpretation of the lives and experience of both the writer [speaker] and the reader [listener]. To be powerful, this pattern must be portrayed in a way that engages readers [listeners] in a genuine act of seeing the essential wholeness of life, the connections of nodal moments. In seeing, the reader [listener] is enabled to see self and other more fully. (p. 66)

It is very hard to make meaning of the rich world of ideas and beliefs espoused by others if they remain disconnected from our own lived experience. As John Dewey (1938) noted, it is our own experience that forms the actual basis of our understanding about the world. Self-study, woven into the fabric of thoughts and ideas put forward by others, allows us in Bruner’s (1996) terms, agency and reflection that help us make what we learn our own. I look back on my years working in special education, while I was busy amassing degrees, working with students, parents, and school communities, becoming the “expert” I thought I wanted to be and I know my actions were grounded in an acquired knowledge base without connection to my own experience. While I knew in my heart and bones what some of those families were experiencing in their home lives because they so closely replicated my own, growing up with a handicapped sibling, my conscious self relied entirely on knowledge from courses and experts to offer support and solutions to problems with living and learning. Looking back now, I hope my deeds were good ones but I know my professional self did not include my personal, heartfelt self as it does now. My theorizing and practice did not include my own experiential knowledge and so did not align with who I was. Missing my own subjectivity in curricular decision-making, I was unaware that my sense of personal power was diminished.

Autobiographical Text as a Place for Building Personal Power

Engaging in narrative methodology and methods, I have understood that autobiographical inquiry provides a curricular space for understanding that through rethinking, retelling, and rewriting our life stories, we gain personal power. We become open to the understanding that our story, like each person’s story, is of value and can add a new dimension to our thinking about curriculum. Over the years, I have seen many instances where through the sharing of personal stories, individual students have understood that their stories are educative and can be used to awaken new thought; that their stories have the capacity to heighten awareness and add to the “complicated conversation” (Pinar 2012) that curriculum can be when it is based in inquiry.

Castaneda (1974) writes in Tales of Power:

Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our own personal power … if you have enough power, my words alone would serve as a means for you to round up the totality of yourself and to get the crucial part of it out of the boundaries in which it is contained. (p. 17)

I consistently see that for those engaging in self-study research, issues, and aspects of personal power emerge and are addressed as part of story writing and sharing, even if at first they have not been visible or thought to be central to personal or professional development. I often think of a few lines from Sarton’s (1993) poem Now I Become Myself as I see individuals begin to embrace their own history and sense the power in their own voice which they can use to build their own expert text to add to their previous versions of curriculumdevelopment.

When I was a doctoral student just beginning to understand the power held in autobiographical inquiry, I read a chapter by Pinar (1994) entitled Working From Within that changed the way I had understood curriculum previously and opened the way for me to approach my students with the intent of hearing their voices and my own as a foundation for curricular learning. Pinar wrote:

I have knowledge of my discipline, some knowledge of my students, and some self-knowledge … I come ready to respond, not only as a student and teacher … but as a person. In fact I must be willing to disclose my thoughts and feelings if I am to hope for similar disclosures from students. (p. 9)

Returning to the quote by Castaneda above, these words helped me to “round up the totality of myself” and break through the boundaries that I had contained me as a teacher and person. Engaging in curriculum through a mutuality of sharing stories of experience provided me with a place to understand the power held in my own and others’ experiences.

Final Thoughts

The process of revising our life scripts to ascertain what Bruner (1996) calls “the past, the present and the possible” clearly situates curriculum in Connelly and Clandinin’s (1988, 1994, 2000) definition of curriculum as all of life’s experience, and in Pinar’s (1994, 1995, 2012) currere, where the point of curriculum scholarship is to participate in the ongoing and complicated conversation that springs from engaging in existential experience. If one accepts these definitions, then curriculum as autobiographical text can be embraced as it provides a way to place our whole selves in our research and teaching.

Atkinson (1995) writes: “Story is a tool for self-discovery; stories tell us new things about ourselves that we wouldn’t have been as aware of without having told the story” (p. 3). In this vision of curricular thought, self-study narrative inquiry as a personal and professional journey and a research genre makes perfect sense. My work remains teaching and supporting others who want to inquire into the tensions and complications they have lived, interrogate the relationships and contradictions they find there and use that data to illuminate their way forward in their personal and professional lives.