The nanny in the schoolhouse: critical reflections
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The nanny in the schoolhouse: critical reflections Jennifer Hauver James
Received: 29 October 2012 / Accepted: 16 January 2013 / Published online: 28 February 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract What can narratives do for us? In this response to Grimes’ article, I endeavor to answer this question, considering the author’s story as both a space for unpacking and the complex intersection of identity, teaching and learning and as an effort to name herself in the midst of such complexity. Specifically, I address the raced, gendered, classed nature of the relationships that Grimes’ suggests facilitate science learning in her classroom, asking ‘‘What is gained or lost when students’ success is attributed to such relationships?’’ Keywords
Caring Mothering Teaching Race Class Gender Narrative
Narratives can be powerful spaces for meaning making. On the one hand, as Grimes notes in her article, we construct ‘‘narratives to explain and interpret things to ourselves and to others’’. In this way, narratives can be spaces where we ascribe meaning to our experience; where we name ourselves. Casting our experience in the form of a story gives it shape. Stories generally have a problem and resolution, a beginning-middle-end sequence, and often a moral or lesson. Stories, then, not only capture a version of ‘‘what happened,’’ but also our understandings of why the experience mattered and what ought to be gleaned from it. Storytelling is an active process—as Ricoeur (1992) suggests, a process of creating and recreating ourselves. Of course, the stories that we tell about ourselves are inherently shaped by the contexts in which our experience takes place and the negotiation of meaning within and among them. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) describe these contexts as constituting the threedimensional space of narrative, explaining that stories are always temporally and spatially Lead Editor: A. Sharma This is a response to Nicole Grimes’ (2013) article entitled ‘‘The nanny in the schoolhouse: The role of femme-Caribbean identity in attaining success in urban science classrooms’’. doi:10.1007/s11422-0129476-1. J. H. James (&) Department of Elementary and Social Studies Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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bound while necessarily caught up in constant tensions between the backward, forward, inward and outward dimensions of our experience. Because each of us has a limited set of discourses with which to make sense of the world, the stories we tell are not only constituted by our experience, by bounded by it as well. When our narratives are offered up as data, on the other hand, as they are within an autobiographical or narrative research study like Grimes’, they become more than just a space for naming our experience, but also spaces within which others may make meaning. And as others encounter our stories, they of course bring their own lenses, contexts and experiences to bear on understanding the nature and import of what they read. In m
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