The authors begin this article looking at the start of the journey through this new 21st century and how educators at every level are endeavoring to meet the challenge to be responsive to the educational needs of their students, current and future. This is especially true in relationship to the education of students of diverse backgrounds…

Purpose: The paper aims to explore the emotion learning experiences of some Chinese immigrants in Canadian engineering workplaces. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on life history style interviews with 14 Chinese immigrant engineers and 14 key informant interviews. Findings: Research respondents constructed a competitive, masculine,…

This study draws on a narrative constructionist framework to examine the active representation of self and experience in second language (L2) ethnographic interviews and autobiographic narratives of immigrant experience. Analysis centers on two versions of a complaint narrative of institutional mistreatment told 2 years apart by a man who…

Although there are many alternative schools that strive for the successful education of their students, negative images of alternative schools persist. While some alternative schools are viewed as "idealistic havens", many are viewed as "dumping grounds" or "juvenile detention centers". Employing narrative inquiry,…

Pre-service teachers bring to their university studies particular world views and understandings of themselves and others around health and physical activity. Their biographies and experiences in school physical education, sport and other societal institutions inform these perspectives and understandings. These in turn work to mediate university…

The purpose of this paper is to report on an assessment task designed to provoke pre-service teacher education students to recollect and share experiences of what enabled and frustrated their learning. The assumption underpinning the creation of this task was that: if teacher education students could, through reflection and discussion, recapture…

In examining life history narratives of 14 linguistically and culturally diverse pre-service teachers, this study addresses two research questions: How do pre-service teachers construct difference between themselves and others? How do they express a sense of belonging and community membership (or construct citizenship) in representing themselves…

We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground…

This article discusses the findings of an exploratory qualitative study that examined the influences of individual and collective sociocultural identities on the community involvements and high academic achievement of 10 Black alumni who attended a predominantly White institution between 1985 and 2008. Syntagmatic narrative analysis and…

To address the question of musical identity, the research the author mainly draws on takes the form of qualitative, in-depth interviews with people about how music fits into their everyday lives and musical biographies. In this the author adopts a largely biographical and social constructionist perspective, asking people to reflect on important…

History is an eminently human quest to recover human experiences and stories. Far from theoretical, the history of education can be seen as vital to the study and practice of teaching if anchored in the cultures and contexts of stories. In university Faculties of Education, the reading of stories and memoirs can lead to open-ended discussion in…

Based on survey data of 1000 young people aged 18-29 and semi-structured interviews with 51 young people aged 18-34 living in a north-western Italian region, the article explores how they account for their first heterosexual intercourse. Young people describe and make sense of their experiences by referring to sexual scripts; narrative sequences…

In the modern world, women have acquired formal education, become professionals in the workforce, and are equal to men according to law. Yet cultural and social mores continue to characterize a woman as one who acts according to stereotypes. For these reasons and others, teaching has long been considered a woman's profession. Realization of the…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze and interpret the stories told by one teacher, Ms. M, in a fifth grade science classroom. In this study, stories are defined as teacher utterances that are used in first person or third person narrative view, and are related to an experience that occurred outside the classroom. This research…

This article focuses on social agents' own understandings of socio-economic mobility and social achievement, exploring the possibilities offered by the tool of "family" life history in the context of formerly Untouchable communities in western India, Maharashtra. While arguing in favour of family life histories as both resource and…