From Experience to Relationships

The six writers in this book explore the contribution and the transferability of narrative inquiry fromcurriculum studies to daily life in education and in healthcare. They examine the interconnectivity ofreconstructed experience with the construction of disciplinary identity and knowledge. Thinking narrativelythey write auto/biographically about relationships between teachers students nurses colleagues and/orpeople in their care. As narrative inquirers they are curious how research moves forward professionalsituations in education and healthcare.The narrative plotlines of knowledge construction curriculum building and identity formation thread throughthe chapters. In education and healthcare the reconstructed experience of a teacher is shown to befoundational to curriculum content and processes. In nursing education we see congruence between narrativeinquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 1995 2000; Connelly & Clandinin 1988 1999) as a process that includes theteacher-researcher as co-participant; and theorists such as Watson (1999) include the nurse in the caringsituation as shapers of the experience of people in their care. As practitioner-researchers teachers in educationand healthcare construct who they are and how they are in relationship in the context of social situations. Inquiry not certainty (Dewey 1929) is a lifestance that is formative for education.Practitioners in education and in healthcare will be interested in this book as a way to make meaning of their experience. Policymakers andadministrators will be interested in this book as a way of conceptualizing teachers' knowledge as a source of curriculum. Researchers will be interestedin this book as a demonstration of how narrative inquiry illuminates ways of being that are educative and an innovative way to study curriculum.