A manifesto for critical narrative research and pedagogy for/with young children: Teacher and child as critical annalist

In this essay I pose the question of whether it might be possible to articulate a collaborative, critical narrative mode of research in which teachers and students come together using a critical and analytic epistemology to engage in adventurous pedagogy. This approach has echoes of Freire’s “teachers-as-students and students- -as-teachers,” but elaborates the Freirean metaphor to include conceptions of emotion, creativity, and incorporation of the latent historical subjectivities of teachers and students in the process. Contrary to the deadening, circumscribed epistemology of putatively “evidence-based” pedagogies, in which teachers and children are expected to check their cultural meaning-making capacities and their emotional investments at the door, this is a plea for a regenerative, engaged, local curriculum making process. As I note in the essay, “This is a strategy that cannot work in the service of utilitarian modes of education that are focused only on value (cf. Appiah, 2015). It can only work for forms of schooling that seek to foster values of receptivity, cultural respect, open-mindedness, and critical imaginaries. In these coldly utilitarian times we need to provide leadership to progressively minded teachers to allow them to develop, document, and disseminate such practices.”