Unearthing Embodied Truths in Curriculum and Instruction: Narrative Plotlines Through A Musical Lens

Abstract

This dissertation employs narrative inquiry as a method, using narrative as a research method to study people’s storied experiences, to delve into teachers’ and students’ experiences related to their identity. My three-article dissertation evolved around not only stories to live by of teachers and students but also my own artistic and aesthetic stories to live by engendered from the thinking with stories process. Given the interest in multi-perspectival ways of knowing, educational researchers have been actively exploring the value of the arts – visual art, fine arts, dance, poetry, novels, etc. – in the qualitative educational research. However, while other modes of art-based research have been actively mixed with the narrative inquiry method, few music-based narrative research studies are available, despite the potential of music as a means of inquiry. This dissertation fills a methodological and knowledge gap in arts-based research and narrative research. Cumulatively, the artistic and aesthetic three-article dissertation delve into the philosophical, the epistemological, the theoretical, and the aesthetic inquiries to make sense of curriculum making, and to investigate and express hidden values in educational contexts. Through musical narrative inquiry, this dissertation capture teachers’ and students’ changing professional and academic identity. The musically re-storied and re-presented stories encompass not only a rich and varied emotional and reflective decision-making processes of teachers/students in four commonplaces (teachers, students, subject-matter, and milieu) as a space for storied identity formation, but also provide valuable insights into teacher as curriculum maker/teacher as improvisational performer, teacher as curriculum implementer/ teacher as canonical performer, best-loved self, and music as metaphor. Furthermore, this research deal with researcher’s reflective return on the musical narrative inquiry process and the ethical issues underlying musical story constellation as a representational form. This dissertation aims to create a dialogue between the academic, artistic, social, philosophical contexts surrounding art-based narrative inquiry processes.