Narrative, Experience and the Study of Curriculum

Abstract

The speed with which Schon’s (1983, 1987) recent works penetrated the reference lists of teacher education writers has been remarkable. Partly, we can explain the phenomenon as resulting from Schon’s work fitting among ongoing lines of inquiry into reflection, practice and their combination. There is another reason, less tangible and more a question of, to borrow a term from Eisner (1979), the educational imagination. We see the practices Schon describes as part of the folklore of teacher education, matters kept alive in staffroom discussion but often referred to negatively outside of schools as the “telling of war stories” and as accounts of mere “learning-by-doing”. These accounts are frequently seen by “scientifically” minded teacher-educators as something to be cleansed from student and novice teachers’ minds in an attempt to pave the way for more “scholarly” norms of teaching. The remnants of these discredited practices remain in the Canadian (and, perhaps, American) imagination as the kind of education that was acceptable in the less scientific days of teacher education gone by. Schon’s books, we like to think, gave modern value to these professional memories.

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