AbstractIn this article we narratively inquire (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) into the making of a curriculum of diversity by attending to children's stories to live by as they rub up against one another, teachers' stories to live by, and stories of school. We focus on a particular curriculum space, peace candle gatherings, as the research site for attending to these moments of bumping up. Data for the article were gathered in two classroom settings, one in an inner-city Year 3–4 classroom and one in a rural Year 1 classroom. In both settings, as the children and teachers gathered around the peace candle, we saw the place of liminality as they negotiated across difference to new ways of living in relation. Attending to the stories to live by of children and teachers, we saw the shaping influence of both cultural stories and stories of school. The bumping up of these stories of school created tensions that are part of a negotiated curriculum space. We explore these negotiations as places of cultural imagination where children and ourselves are encouraged to inquire into the tensions between and among our lives. This narrative inquiry provides new ways of understanding the complexities of curriculum making in classrooms of cultural diversity. Attending in this way helped us to see ways in which tension shapes the making of a curriculum of diversity. We see that the making of a curriculum of diversity is, necessarily, an uncertain, moment-by-moment making. Dis-ease, as both children and teachers step outside of familiar plot lines shaped by their narratives of experience and dominant stories of school, shapes the making of a curriculum of diversity as we learn to hear others' stories, imagine other possibilities, restorying our own and our relational stories.
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Huber et al. (2003) studied this question.