Abstract
This chapter traces how temporality became a foundational aspect in the development of my narrative conceptualization of trauma. This understanding grew from attending to how elementary and secondary teachers’ personal and professional contexts, knowledge, and identities, narratively understood as stories to live by (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998), are shaped by and are shaping experiences of/with trauma. Over the course of the 2-year inquiry, the stories that Tobias, a co-inquirer, and I were living, telling, retelling, and reliving (Clandinin, 2013) surfaced tensions with the more dominant Euro-Western ways of knowing and being (Fellner, 2018) that seemed to homogenize and pathologize trauma as a single and defining story (Adichie, 2009) of identity. Thinking with (Morris, 2002) the stories we shared, this chapter shows how, in our gradual unfolding of a narrative conceptualization of trauma, temporality became central as we inquired into how dominant narratives of ‘good’ teacher/ing often bump against the experience of, what we came to call, infolding. We found infolding, as a way of narratively naming the experience typically referred to as a ‘trauma trigger,’ offered an alternative to better understand the smoothing out, and/or silencing of the multilayered and complex experiences shaping teachers’ making of their lives, alongside children, youth, and families’ making of their lives, in and outside of schools.
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Notes
- 1.
When using entries from our transcripts, field notes, and digital field texts, Tobias and I chose specific fonts to reflect our contributions. In this chapter, Tobias’ words will be a bolded version of the font. When we used and read these fonts, we agreed that we could both ‘hear’ Tobias speaking, and we agreed that this reflected the relational ways in which we shared our inquiry.
- 2.
Stories to live by is narrative conceptualization of how teachers’ knowledge, contexts, and identities can be understood narratively (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999, p. 4).
- 3.
Early school leavers/leaving is a term used by Clandinin et al. (2013) to (re)imagine and (re)conceptualize what has more typically been referred to as dropping out of school.
- 4.
While discussed later in the chapter, here I share Clandinin et al.’s (2010) conceptualization: Thinking narratively, we attend to the commonplaces of narrative inquiry: temporality (past, present, future), sociality (the dialectic between inner and outer, the personal and social), and place (the concrete physicality of the place or places in which experiences are lived out and told). (p. 82).
- 5.
I will further discuss how Tobias and I came to a gradual understanding of what these terms meant to us in the context of our inquiry. I began this process without knowing what this term meant, and have shaped this chapter to reflect our unfolding.
- 6.
Inspired by Butler-Kisber’s (2002) practice of drawing on “the words of the participant(s) to create a poetic rendition of a story” (p. 232) and that found poems can “be a way of representing holistically what might otherwise go unnoticed” (p. 235), we co-wrote the poem above, in a font chosen by Tobias, shaping it left and right to show the temporal differences in his past and present experience.
- 7.
My understanding of life in the making/life making is informed by experience as life making, and that knowledge “is acquired and negotiated in relationships” (Estefan et al., 2016, p. 27).
- 8.
In classrooms, and in our inquiry, both Tobias and I strove to bump against and reduce some of the more typical stories of hierarchy (teacher/student; research/participant). To show this more relational way of being, we use the word ‘alongside’ to describe how we positioned ourselves within our various context.
- 9.
Tobias and I discussed what we understood the dominant narratives of school to be. These were stories and practices that were generally and passively accepted such as stories of obedience, schedule/routine, competition, and the importance of “the” curriculum (mandated outcomes).
- 10.
Clandinin and Connelly (2000) situate research puzzles rather than research questions as a “sense of a search, a ‘re-search,’ a searching again … a sense of continual reformulation” (p. 124) that “begins in the midst, and ends in the midst of experience” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 43) as they refer to the central wonders of the inquiry.
- 11.
Greene (1977, 1995) thought with ‘awakeness’ in relation with human experience as a way of understanding our “responsibilities as individuals in a changing and problematic world … our being in the world” (p. 119). It is in this spirit of beginning to understand our worlds and how our places within them had been constructed for us that we drew on Maxine Greene.
- 12.
On April 6, 2018, 16 people, all associated with the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League’s Humboldt Broncos hockey team were killed when their bus collided with a transport truck in Saskatchewan. Most of the dead and injured were hockey players on the team, and had been known to Tobias, or were his friends or former teammates. https://curio.ca/en/video/tragedy-on-the-prairies-the-humboldt-broncos-bus-crash-18476/
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tobias, and the other co-inquirers from my doctoral work who awakened me to such important aspects in relation with a narrative conceptualization of trauma. Equally, I would like to thank Dr. Janice Huber, who for many years now, as been my academic guide, mentor, and friend. I would also like to thank my power-house response group of narrative inquirers: Tarah Edgar, Dr. Hang Tran, Dr. Yuanli Chen, and Dr. Christie Schultz. This group continues to support and sustain me in many ways.
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Reid, N.S. (2023). Shifting Landscapes of Experience: Temporality and a Narrative Conceptualization of Trauma. In: Griffin, S.M., Niknafs, N. (eds) Traumas Resisted and (Re)Engaged. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 36. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6277-8_8
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