ON-LINE ISSUES

V.4 N.1, March 1997

Foreword

by Ted Aoki

Department of Language Education
University of British Columbia

1. "Curriculum as Narrative/Narrative as Curriculum."
2. The words and the graphic mark inscribed in the conference title dance before me. A trio of words in seeming movement to the right, returns as the same though re-ordered trio. And in the re-ordering, meanings shift. The first trio, "Curriculum as narrative," opens up a landscape of curriculum as signifier with multiple possible meanings, among which is curriculum-as- narrative; likewise, the second trio, "Narrative as curriculum," opens up its own landscape with "narrative" as its master signifier, soliciting from among others "narrative-as-curriculum." But the title says more, for in the midst of the two sets is a bold graphic mark, a diagonal stroke (/) that within its slant is already inscribed living tension.
3. The very words "curriculum-as-narrative" beckons a landscape that acknowledges curricula-as-live(d) by teachers and students, each living through his/her unique live(d) experiences. It is in this site that live(d) experiences become linked with an understanding that we, as humans, live narratively. In recent years, narrating of live(d) experiences has become a legitimated research modality such that, at the graduate level, courses styled "narrative research" have become legitimated, particularly within the discursive genre labelled "qualitative research." And within the latter, ethnographic and phenomenological writings have appeared in theses and dissertations near the boundary lines of traditional academic research.
4. Today, we are experiencing irruptions at the margins of Modernist research discourses in the name of new "isms" - like poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism - compelling us to pause awhile as we question ideological assumptions that make different storied worlds possible.
5. For us, interested in narratives, a key break looms in the faultline that has appeared in "live(d) experience." Postmodernist Jonathan Culler boldly and succinctly writes:

   "Experience is divided and deferred - already behind us as something to be recovered, yet still before us as something to be produced." (Emphasis added, p. 82)
   - Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction -

   Of interest to us is the way in which the splitting of "experience" provokes in us a reflective pause, urging us to attend to both the discursive regime within which narrating is understood as recovery, from somewhere deep below, the essence of past lived experiences, and as well to another regime within which narrating is understood as performance that produces effects. Here, let us carve out from the middle of the conference title "narrative/narrative" that compels us to focus on the diagonal "/", interpreted as a grapheme that simultaneously is partly vertical and partly horizontal, tropically reminding us of differing signifying practices that narrating may consciously or unconsciously accommodate.

6. We are all familiar with narratives that claim to respond responsibly to questions such as "What was it like to experience life lived in school?" or "What does it mean being a teacher or student in school?", popular ontological, existential, phenomenological questions. Narrating guided by such questions typically assume a vertical chain of metaphoric signifiers that attempt to re-present the presence of the essential theme or being believed to be momentarily invisibly hidden in the deep. Such representational narratives are written midst discourses that assume metaphysics of presence within Modernist discourses, given to a necessary illusion of the presence of essence. Much ethnic narrative writing presumes the presence of the reality of origin or heritage, what Homi Bhabha calls a belief in the presence of identity as "the deep me." In such narratives, the form of narratives is metaphoric in signification - metaphoric signifiers forming a chain of substitutions along a vertical axis. Of interest is the claim by some linguists that those in the Modernist tradition who hold to the imaginary that metaphor is the fundamental property of thought and life tend to presume that thought takes precedence over language - a well established belief.
7. Questioning the foregoing are poststructuralists who question Modernism's essentialism. For them, narrative writing is not so much a writing at a distance in time and space about past experiences that are presumed to be in the living present, those but for the recovery. Rather, for them, narrative writing as signifying practice is enactively performative - as Culler indicated in the short extract cited above - productive of effects, situated horizontally midst words and language, always partial "truths," even deferred, therefore always incomplete. Here, meanings seem to float.
8. Recent writings support such imaginary. Dr. Trevor Barnes of U.B.C. claims geo-graphy (earth-writing) is not so much writing about "geo" (earth) but more so graphic writing that produces "geo" (See Trevor Barnes and J. Duncan (Eds.), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape). Robert Young, claiming historicism that assumes the possibility of recovery of the past is a myth, counter-claims that history's big stories are constituted in the performative act of writing (See Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West). And Clifford and Marcus, poststructural anthropologists, questioning the typical ethnographic stance given to writing about "ethnos" assuming the presence of ethnic culture as "thing," call for transformation of ethnography into writing "ethnos," writing that invents "ethnos" as effect (See J. Clifford and G. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography).
9. Given the differing positions of narrating curricular experiences as recovery of past experiences and as production of effects in the midst of living experiences, what is it for us as conferees to dwell in the midst of the doubling of live(d) experiences, in the midst of the doubling of verticality and horizontality of the "/"?
10. No doubt, such dwelling is a dwelling in the midst of ambivalence and ambiguity. But to dwell so positioned seems already to seek displacement of the Modernist binary of "either-or," and to be already engaged, like it or not, enactively in the midst of differences, caught in a struggle midst difficulties, nonetheless, a place of hope, of generative possibilities.
11. So located, we conferees dedicated to the interplay of "curriculum as narrative/narrative as curriculum" have assembled attuned to the possibility of re-articulating the space of "/" that we inhabit. So located, are we not in a position to resist, if we so desire, not verticality but rather verticality that claims the firm ground of static essentialism? Simultaneously, are we not located such that we can question horizontality that tends toward an altogether floating world, that of anarchic relativism? The texture of the conference title encourages me to anticipate voices that articulate their positioning midst the doubling in the title.
12. I am grateful indeed that the Conference was called in part to honor me. But, in truth, I am more grateful for the gathering of conferees willing to share with others their understandings of the web of relationships between curriculum and narrative. But most of all, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate jointly with my conference colleagues speaking of curriculum and narrative, anticipating a living through that dissolves into textured lines of movement that we might call "narration" - a dynamic, vital space of no narrative-as-things, a space of no-thing, indeed a space of narration that is a condition for the becomings of narratives.