Composing Lives Alongside: Narrative Meaning Making and Life Making in Relation

Introduction

This paper is part of a more expansive narrative inquiry into the curriculum making¹ of individuals who compose identities dissonant with dominant stories of gender and sexuality. The term curriculum making refers to the ongoing process through which individuals make sense and meaning of experience. We (the researchers) thought about normalized notions of gender and sexuality as a dominant story—a socially constructed account of experience, perspective, or way of being that represents a majority or dominant group of people within a society. As such, we focused on the ways participants make sense of their lives through lived experience when the dominant storylines of gender and sexuality “that form the context of their lives…don’t seem to fit” (Andrews, 2002, p. 1). Here we focus on the experiences of one participant, Jamie², in order to consider and describe the complexity involved in negotiating an identity shaped by dominant societal narratives of sexuality, narratives that often tell us how to be. In this paper we seek to address the question of how an individual’s sense making about self is shaped by other people—the relationships, communities, and contexts that shape the stories people know and live.

Narrative notions of curriculum making are rooted in a Deweyan ontological and epistemological framework (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007) that recognizes “one permanent frame of reference: namely, the organic connection between education and personal experience” (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 25). Clandinin and Connelly (1992) drew on the work of Dewey and Schwab (1973) to describe curriculum making as “a curricular process…in which teacher, learners, subject matter, and milieu are in dynamic interaction” (p. 392). Thinking about meaning making in this way, as situated in the life of and from the perspective of the learner, allowed us (the inquirers) to attend to the narrative quality of knowing. An individual’s stories of knowing and meaning are shaped by personal experience, relationships, and social context(s).

From this perspective, we understand curriculum as “a course of life” (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992, p. 393), which shifts understandings of curriculum beyond the context of school and schooling. The study of education is about life and attention to lives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Our attention toward the lives of participants in the larger study, and in this inquiry particularly, does not center, but is inclusive of, school experience. At the same time, we maintain that an inquiry into curriculum making has theoretical and practical implications for educators. More specifically, this inquiry highlights the ways that life stories are composed alongside, connected to and shaped by other people, and draws the attention of educators to the complex lives unfolding in schools.

Individuals engage in identity making as they make sense of themselves in relation to their stories of knowing; they are learners of their own lives (Clandinin et al., 2006, p. 13). As such, we think about identity making as the composition of stories to live by³ (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), where identity is understood narratively as life stories lived and told. As the participants were in the midst of their lives, of engaging in a curriculum making tied to identity making, they were in the process of life writing (Heilbrun, 1988). We take up this metaphor in order to think about identity as situated in and shaped by the complexities of lived experience. Life stories are composed through life experience—stories shift as experience adds nuance to knowing. As Clandinin et al. (2006) explained, “As they gain a deeper awareness of their story to live by, they begin to shift those stories as they continue to go about their days” (p.10).