Journal of Curriculum and Supervision Summer 2000, Vol. 15, No.

4, 315-331

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M NABJRATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS ' ^ ^ F TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

F. MICHAEL CONNELLY, University of Toronto D. JEAN CLANDININ, University of Alberta

ABSTRACT: In this paper we explore two interrelated questions. The first question is "How should we think about teacher knowledge?" Using two different studies, we develop a notion of a three-dimensional narrative inquiry space as a way to think narratively about teacher knowledge. The second question is "What is teacher knowledge?" For this question we outline two sets of termsprofessional knowledge landscape and personal practical knowledge. Using these two sets of terms we develop a narrative understanding of teaching in one school's science classroom. We use classroom field texts focused on two child-oriented teachers and a teacher aide. The teachers have very different views on how a particular science unit should be taught. We explore these differences by thinking narratively (question 1) about detailed classroom events that occur over a period of time. Although the teachers have similar child-oriented philosophies, their differing rhythms of teaching are used to account for the teaching differences. Philosophy and rhythm are aspects of teacher knowledge (question 2). 'hen I film my image I feel myself like a little boat floating over the water on a journey. Around me, there is a beautiful landscaperocks, mountains, flowers, grass and trees shining among the bamboo light. Above me, there is a blue sky. Through the air comes Dvorak's The New World. Against me is either a comfortable breeze or a blowing wind. I am crossing an overlapping space embracing two cultures. I have to be careful about water underneath me and the wind around me or against me so as not to be gulped by them."' A "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students teaches culturally relevant pedagogy, doesn't she?^ Authors' Note: A version of this article was presented as a keynote address at the National Science Education Leadership Association's Summer Institute, Cambria, California, 21-24 July 1999. 'Ming Fang He, "A Life-Long Inquiry Forever Flowing Between China and Canada: Crafting a Composite Auto/biographical Narrative Method to Represent Three Chinese Women Teachers' Cultural Ey^periences" Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction (Spring 1999): 5-29. ^Gloria Ladson-BiUings, The Dream Keepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994).

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A "good" teacher of itnmigrant and ESL students puts culture at tiie forefront of her teaching, doesn't h ^ A "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students is more willing to embrace multicultural education, isn't h ^ A "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students can be a good role model for immigrant students, can't she?' A "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students has had the experience of being an immigrant, or is a minority, or, if not, then like me, she has had the experience of living in another culture or other cultures, learning other languages, and this makes her more empathetic to minority and immigrant students, doesn't it?^ A "good" teacher of immigrant and ESL students is very loving towards immigrant children and is a community activist, isn't ^ Minority teachers can help prepare all students for the multicultural workplace and global economy of the present and future, can't they?^

"When I began to do research in Bay Street School in Pam's classroom, I knew the answers to all those questions on the list. The answer was a resounding, unequivocal, very loudly shouted, 'Yes'! . . . Can you imagine my shock when I began to realize that Pam did not follow my script? . . . As the literature fenced in my thinking, I attempted to fence in Pam. Pam was a 'visible minority,' Black, immigrant. Surely she would follow the visible minority immigrant teacher's script I and others had been crafting? The answer to that question was a resounding no. This is when the struggles began; this is when the dilemmas surfaced. This is when I put my values, my beliefs, my ways of thinking, and my everyday way of engaging in life under scrutiny and threw them into question. "'

'X. Su, "Why Teach? Profiles and Entry Perspectives of Minority Teachers as Becoming Teachers,"/owma/ of Research and Development in Education 29 (March 1996): 117-133. '*Ibid, 5p. Graham, "Black Teachers: A Drastically Scarce Resource," Phi Delta Kappan (April 1987): 598-605. ^X. Su, "Why Teach? Profiles and Entry Perspectives of Minority Teachers as Becoming Teachers," foumal of Research and Development in Education 29 (March 1996): 117-133. ^JoAnn Phillion and B. Singh, "Immigrant Teachers" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 1997). ?Dennis Searle, personal communication, 19 June 1996. 'JoAnn Phillion, "Narrative Inquiry in a Multicultural Landscape: Multicultural Teaching and Learning" (doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto, 1999).

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The two quotations that bracket the questions about "a good teacher" are drawn from two quite different studies of teacher knowledge. In the first, Ming Fang He explores three Chinese teachers' learning during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and their adjustment to North America, where they pursue higher education. She traces her participants' narrative life courses, attending to their movements among cultures, and studies their changing stories to live by, their changing identities. In the second study, JoAnn Phillion inquires into an urban teacher's teaching practices^which Phillion expected, at the outset, to be mostly a demonstration of multicultural knowledge and theory. The study develops into an intensely reflective process in which the classroom knowledge of the teacher, Pam, as expressed in her practices, leads Phillion to question her own knowledge and, indeed, to question the more or less taken for granted knowledge in the field. The purpose of this article is to present a personal and contextual narrative understanding of teacher knowledge. Why, then, do we refer to two such disparate studies? First, it is important to approach the topic of teacher knowledge as a straightforward, commonplace, everyday aspect of human experience. It is not something esoteric requiring special technical or theoretical academic insights. We Can learn about teacher knowledge from He's study of Chinese women immigrants and PhiUion's study of an elementary school teacher. We can learn, too, from the experiences of each of them doing their studies. Ming Fang He is part of the phenomena she describes, and JoAnn PhiUion's knowledge of teaching is put into question by Pam's knowledge of teaching. If we pay attention to our students and to ourselves, we can learn and enhance our own knowledge, as did these two researchers. The second reason for bringing these studies forward is that they shed light on how teachers and researchers might think about teacher knowledge. This creates a dual agenda for this article: How should we think about teacher knowledge? and What is teacher knowledge? In the following section we use He's and PhiUion's work to address the first question. We then consider the second question by exploring the teaching of a grades 7-8 science unit in an urban school. HOW SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT TEACHER KNOWLEDGE? Our work and that of our students has addressed the question of teacher knowledge. However, we also work in narrative inquiry.

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Recently we have begun to ask: What is the link between narrative and teacher knowledge? Over the years, we have studied teacher knowledge in various ways. We think of teacher knowledge in narrative terms, describing it in terms of narrative life constructions. We do not see teacher knowledge as something fixed and static to be replaced by something else, but as something lifelike, something storied, something that flows forward in ever changing shapes. Teachers and students do not, in our view, come together as bearers of mature and immature knowledge, the immature to be replaced by the mature. Rather, we see everyone, teachers and students, living out stories in which they figure as characters. What we or anyone else knows^what student and teacher may be said to knoware expressions of those stories. To understand what happens when teacher and student meet in teaching-learning situations, it is necessary to understand their stories. The stories these narratives are built on are both personal, reflecting a person's life history, and social, reflecting the professional contexts in which teachers live. These professional contexts, which we call teachers' professional knowledge landscapes,^" are also narratively constructed. We live in a world of stories, and, though we help shape those stories, we are shaped by them. Our stories, and the shaping stories of our professional knowledge landscapes, are narratively constructed. Both our personal stories and our landscape stories have moral, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions. This is a brief sketch of teacher knowledge understood in terms of storied people living on storied landscapes. Thus, we both define and think about teacher knowledge narratively. Accordingly, we say that narrative is both phenomenon and method. Teacher knowledge, the phenomenon, is narrative; and the way we think about it, and study it, is narrative. Thus, our work on narrative inquiry is, for us, an outgrowth of our study of teacher knowledge. He's and Phillion's work allows us to see the broad ouflines of how one thinks narratively about teacher knowledge. Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space In recent work we describe how one learns to think narratively." We imagine that to think narratively one is positioned within a three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, with the three dimensions being temporal (past, present, and future), personal/existential.
'D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, "Teachers' Professional Knowledge Landscapes," in Advances in Contemporary Educational Thought Series, ed. Jonas F. Soltis (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995). "D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2000).

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and place. As we try to understand teacher knowledge, we see it as something flexible and fluid, depending on the situation. We can give an account of teacher knowledge using a three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. We imagine a teacher's knowledge to be positioned along each of these dimensions and, therefore, to inhabit a three-dimensional space. Temporal. Our work on teacher knowledge is informed by John Dewey's writing on experience.^^ One of Dewey's criteria of experience is continuity. Everything we experience grows out of prior experience and enters into new experience. This leads us to think of teacher knowledge as something with a past and a future. When He writes, "When I film my image I feel myself like a little boat floating over the water on a journey," she is speaking about her knowledge of herself. In talking about this knowledge, she talks about a journey, something that takes place over time. Her knowing of herself is temporal. Moreover, her overall study is temporal as she reviews her knowledge development in China and in Canada and as she peers into the future to wonder how she will know herself in her new Western academic world. Likewise, as Phillion contrasts her knowledge of urban school teaching at the beginning of her research with ideas developing throughout the study, she is giving a temporal narration of her knowledge of this matter. Neither He nor Phillion gives a sense that her knowledge at one time was primitive and at another time more complete, nor that one kind of knowledge has been replaced by another. Rather there is continuitytemporal continuity with a present made up of the past, like but unlike it. Personal/Existential. The second dimension of teacher knowledge is a personal/existential dimension. A second criterion of experience for Dewey is interaction, by which he meant the exchanges taking place between a person's inner self and the surrounding world. We adopted this notion to think of teacher knowledge as composed of personal and existential, inner and outer, qualities. On these grounds no one's knowledge is purely personal or purely external. For example, in the sciences, this means that a teacher's views can never be only his or her own; and it means, less obviously, that science is not what is found in books or in university courses and libraries. Scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is always tinged by the personal, by how an individual knows it. Polanyi, a chemist, referred to this knowledge as "personal knowledge" and wrote a book by the same title.^' When He writes, "Around me, there is a beautif'ul landscape," and when she refers to
Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1938). '^Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

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"the water underneath me and the wind around me," she is drawing attention to the existential, to the things outside her personal self that influence what she knows. Phillion's study is also about the interaction of the personal and the existential. It is about how the story of teaching she put herself into by agreeing to be a narrative inquirer in Pam's classroom interacts with, and modifies, her own knowledge. Pam's teaching, the class experience, the school, and the community interact with Phillion's personal knowledge. Place. The third dimension of teacher knowledge is place. Place might be considered part of the existential, part of the environment with which the personal interacts. But place has such a special quality in teacher knowledge that we think of it as a third dimension in ournarrative inquiry space. Virtually everything changes in some significant measure as teacher narratives urfold in different places. For He the places are China and Canada, and, as her narrative unfolds, these consist of different specific places. He's places create what she calls an "overlapping space" that she thinks of as "embracing two cultures." Though not as evident in the cited excerpt from Phillion's work, place plays an important role in Pam's stories, as she talks about the Caribbean, Bay Street School, and other teaching sites in Canada; as Phillion talks about her upbringing and her teaching life juxtaposed against Bay Street School and its community; and as the children are described as coming from different countries to Canada and' to Bay Street School. Place plays an important role in understanding the three Chinese women's knowledge in He's study, and Pam's and Phillion's knowledge in Phillion's study. The Context for Discussion In the following section, we address the second question: What is teacher knowledge? There is no one-to-one correspondence between the two questions. Echoes of the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space are apparent throughout the discussion of teacher knowledge, which focuses on a grades 7-8 science unit team-taught by Sam, his coteacher Helen, and Jeanette, a teacher aide, in a threeroom Learning Center at Bay Street School.^"^ We can see temporality in Sam's teaching; relations between the existential and the personal in Sam's teaching landscape; and the power of place shaping Sam's knowledge of science teaching. We first met Sam and Jeanette when we began our work at Bay Street School in 1981. They were high-profile characters in the story of school. Sam was known for his activities with children who lived
"AU names of teachers, students, and the school are pseudonyms.

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Figure 1. Grades 7-8 Science Unit

May 1985 During the month of May we will be studying 1) characteristics of living things 2) classification of living things 3) interdependence of living things 4) adaptation and behavior 5) life cycles

The five-day field trip will be centered around these units along with rocks and minerals. Those students not going on the five-day trip will participate in the series of one-day trips that week, including a trip to the farm. Students are to work in groups of two to four to collect material, develop an exhibit, and make a presentation. Each group will study their specimens and report on the following characteristics: 1) classification 2) movement and locomotion 3) growth asexual and sexual reproduction life cycles 4) reproduction 5) metabolism 6) cellular basis of life 7) irritability 8) adaptation inherited behavior tropisms and taxes learned behavior protective mechanisms body language 9) natural community 10) ecosystem 11) producer, consumer, and food chains 12) photosynthesis/respiration 13) food chains

in marginal economic and social circumstances. Jeanette was an African-Canadian teacher aide with strong connections to parents and children in the community. They did innovative things together, such as a school lunch program involving students and parents. In 1984 the two-member team expanded to three with the inclusion of Helen, someone also storied as a child-oriented teacher, but storied differently than Sam. Figure 1 is an excerpt from a class handout describing the grades 7-8 science unit. The unit covers five topics in biology as well as rocks and minerals. Student reports are to cover a wide array of biology topics and concepts. The field trips, the exhibits, and the presentations tie the unit together instructionally. Although the unit proceeded according to this plan, tension developed between Sam and Helen even before the unit began. Specifically, Helen objected to the field trip to a farm because the class had gone to the farm earlier in the year, and she didn't see any point in going back again, given the large amount of science content that needed to be covered in the unit. We address this tension later in the article.

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WHAT IS TEACHER KNOWLEDGE? There is a saying that the world is visible in a grain of sand. Sam's teaching of the science unit is like this grain of sand. Careful examination of his teaching of the science unit reveals a great deal about his knowledge, and teacher knowledge more generally. With our grain of sand in hand, we now set forth a language, a set of ideas, concepts, and terms for thinking about teacher knowledge. These fall into two interrelated areas: teachers' professional knowledge landscape and teachers' personal practical knowledge. When we say "teacher knowledge" we mean both of these, though in any particular situation we may mean one more than the other. Professional Knowledge Landscape Every teacher works in a particular setting in which things are known in certain ways. We call this setting a professional knowledge landscape. Though it may seem that science is science, how science is known depends upon the knowledge landscape in which a teacher operates. Grades 7 and 8 science is not the same in an urban school, a northern native community school, a private school for the wealthy, a university school, a science and technologyoriented school. Teacher knowledge of grades 7 and 8 science is not the same everywhere. Rather, teachers know science in terms of their professional knowledge landscape. The landscape is part of teacher knowledge. Landscape and Conduit. One of the most notable features of a teacher's professional knowledge landscape is its dependence on the outside world. Many things are funneled onto the landscape as if through a conduit. There may be departmental policies, a departmental chair and staff responsible for grade or divisional curriculum, a school administration responsible for various aspects of curriculum, and a school board and a government with curriculum policies. What may have seemed in university study to be a free and independent science is, in teaching, experienced as something partially imposed by others and something competing with other subjects for time in the teaching cycle. Teachers are often judged on how well students perform on tests associated with science curriculum policies. Thus, a teacher knows science and science teaching not only as an academic scholarly topic but, perhaps more so, as a constrained, predefined, negotiated matter. In Sam's case, government and board of education science policy guidelines spelled out mandatory grades 7 and 8 science topics that, were funneled onto his landscape. The unit began in May with a sense of urgency. The topics needed to be covered, and it was late

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in the year. The policy, in its temporal classroom context, was a key force in shaping events in Sam, Jeanette, and Helen's Learning Center in May and June. In- and Out-of Classroom Places. Teachers live their professional lives in two places: in and out of the classroom. Epistemologically, from a knowledge point of view, these are fundamentally different.^5 The out-of-classroom place is a place where teachers cope with transmissions through the conduit and where cover stories of teaching are told. The classroom is a safe place for living out secret stories of teaching. As described below, Sam and Helen have different narrative histories with respect to these two landscape places. These different narrative histories shape the story they lived together. Nested Stories. One way of thinking about the landscape is that it is a nest of stories into which one fits and becomes a character. Bay Street School was an urban school storied around the district as a racially troubled school with poor student achievement. The stories of the students in grades 7 and 8 were stories of learning difficulty associated with culture, language, growth spurts, puberty, and sense of identity. The school board had recently implemented a policy to raise student achievement and change the way students, and others, viewed one another in racial terms. The principal, Phil Bingham, was hired because of school, school board, and community stories of him as a community-oriented principal. He came to the school via the conduit because of the stories of him and of the school. Sam's project approach in science won approval because it was consistent with the new principal's personal philosophy, something we have written about elsewhere.^^ Both Sam and Helen shared a story of themselves as child-oriented teachers. But Helen was storied as a disciplined, organized homeroom teacher and Sam as a creative, independent teacher, oriented out of school. Secret, Cover, and Sacred Stories. Secret stories refer to inclassroom stories of teaching hidden from public view. Cover stories are stories told publicly out of the classroom. Sacred stories are stories one does not question, such as "Theory drives practice" or "Children come first in this school." We return to this set of stories later in the article.
''D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, "Teachers' Professional Knowledge Landscapes: Teacher StoriesStories of TeachersSchool StoriesStories of Schools," Educational Researcher 25 (April 1996): 24-30. '^D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, "Narrative and Story in Practice and Research," in The Reflective Turn: Case Studies of Reflective Practice, ed. D. Schn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), pp. 258-281.

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Personal Practical Knowledge Whereas the professional knowledge landscape is contextual and points outward, personal practical knowledge is individual and points inward. The terms, composed of aesthetic, moral, and affective elements, are designed to create a language close to experience. This is a language of practice that refers to what teachers do as well as to what they say. We have, through work with teachers such as Sam, developed seven key terms: image, rule, practical principle, personal philosophy, metaphor, narrative unity, and rhythmP Our discussion of the teaching of the science unit includes references to personal philosophy and rhythm. THE SCIENCE UNIT We begin in the staff room of Bay Street School, where we are seated with Sam. Ourfieldnotesfrom May 9,1985, give the following account: We then talked about boats since Sam is a fanatic, and in the middle of this Sam got a call telling him his science class was starting. We returned to the classroom. Sam launched into a lesson on classification. He began by having the kids classify sports. When someone would name a sport, he would say, "That is not a type; we are looking for a type." A classification system built on indoor versus outdoor, team versus individual, and so forth, was constructed. Sam pointed out that different people have different classifications. Jason asked if he would give them the "standard" classification. He said he would when they got to the classification of living things. Students were then asked to classify the modes of transportation noted on the board. There was a fair amount of difficulty with it, but some students, such as Andrew, who had so much trouble with reading, got the idea, put up the title "Classification," and then noted "motor versus other." The rest of the period was taken up with student-suggested classifications and Sam drawing a large diagram on the board. When this exercise was complete students were asked to imagine different kinds of transportation devices. The idea was that by doing this they would come up with additions to the classification system. The kids were totally task oriented during this time. Students who might normally have been disruptive made creative suggestions which were probably designed to be disruptive but which showed the amount of thinking going on. For instance, Walter suggested balloons and argued that balloons were natural (one of the categories on the board), while others argued that balloons should be classified "by man" since the balloon would have been blown up by manpower. A series of these types of arguments over whether or not something should be classified one way or another developed. At the end of the class Sam held them a bit longer than normal to get them started on the classification of living things. He had them break liv'^F. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin, Teachers as Curriculum Planners: Narratives of Experience (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988).

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ing things into plants, animals, and protists. He then focused on vertebrates. Students were asked to give examples, and they ended up saying they (students) were animals and would be classified as vertebrates. Three things in these fieldnotes are important to our account of Sam's knowledge: 1. Sam is in the staff room talking about boats. He needs to be called because the class is assembled and waiting. 2. Although the classroom discussion is structured, it starts with what the children know. 3. At the end of the lesson, Sam keeps the students past the scheduled time. THE RESEARCH PUZZLES Earlier we said the world is visible in a grain of sand. In the brief fieldnotes describing the discussion of. classification, science teaching in the Learning Center is visible. The excerpt is like a grain of sand. Several puzzling features of the events surrounding this unit are explained, at least partially, by thinking narratively: the tension between Sam and his coteachers; the structure of science subject matter in the unit (that is, the list of six unit topics and project report topics), puzzling because one teaching unit includes so many disparate topics; and the structure of the unit overall from beginning to end, puzzling because the project-oriented, out-of-school activities do not appear to take into account the time crunch involved in trying to cover so many science topics in such a short time. Tension Between the Teachers Though the students had visited the farm eadier in the year, Sam plans to make the field trip to the farm the science unit's "grand finale." Helen and Jeanette believe this is a waste of time, because they think the planned activities are repetitive and inefficient. Their knowledge differs from Sam's. To make sense of these differences, we begin by exploring Sam's personal philosophy and the different teaching rhythms experienced by the teachers. Important aspects of Sam's philosophy are apparent in a class discussion following a fight between two boys, as described in fieldnotes from April 4, 1985: Sam called the children to the carpet. He said that a very nasty and sad incident had occurred yesterday afternoon. Brian and Weisan were involved, and the rest of the class had been observers. Brian and Weisan were play

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acting. Brian made a negative comment, and Weisan took him seriously. He hit Brian. Brian lost his temper and beat Weisan up. Sam said that it was extremely sad to see something like this deteriorate to physical violence. It turned out that when he got the two of them together in a separate room and talked to them that they both quite like each other. Sam said that the children have to try and see the positive things in each other. He said that Weisan is going through some difficult times because he is new to the country and he feels that people jeer him because of the way he talks and dresses and because he is so small. He then said that Brian is going through some personal problems of his own. He made the point that every one of the children had something positive to offer to society and to the community. He said the community which they are involved in at the moment is their classroom. He said that they all have great lives ahead of them with numerous career choices. He said the way he looks after his car, he needs somebody who knows a lot about cars to look after it. He said there are many different professions to consider and that every one of them in the classroom has the potential to excel at something. He said that they are also going through a stage in life when they are changing from adolescents into young men and young women and that can be a pretty traumatic time. He said you can often be very wrapped up within yourself. He told them that you have to be aware of other people's feelings. He said that when they go to high school they will make some friends there that will be their friends for life. He said if they are always going to be negative towards people they won't make very many friends. He said that this morning he found out that a very close friend of his from high school had died. He said that this is the third person from his high school days that he has been close to that has died either through car accidents or natural causes. Jason asked what happened to his friend this morning. Sam said that he had had a heart attack. Sam ended up by saying that today was Day 1 of a new cycle and that he wanted all of them to start today in a very positive upbeat mood. This set of fieldnotes expresses Sam's personal philosophy insofar as it relates to children and relations among people. Part of this philosophy addresses the futurefriends in high school and later in life. Part of it addresses knowledge and skills and how people get along in the world, doing things they are good at, everyone with a role to play. This aspect of Sam's personal philosophy helps us think about his personal practical knowledge. He thinks about relationships among students, and he thinks about their futures in high school and beyond, to adult life. He thinks of each student's history, Weisan's recent immigration, and Brian's personal troubles, and he wants the students to think about this for each other. He thinks narratively, and he asks his students to think narratively.

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Aspects of Sam's philosophy show up in his science teaching. The unit handout states that "each group will be evaluated on their depth of study, their presentation, and their display." However, when it comes time to present their work, Sam has the students develop their own evaluation criteria. The process of doing this is recorded in our fieldnotes of June 13, 1985:
Sam had a class discussion on the science presentations which were to be made by groups of three or four. They were to be judged and graded by a group of ten students. Sam said they could decide the criteria to grade the presentations. There was much discussion. They developed a list of eight items: content, written report, oral presentation, visual presentation, observations, depth of content, diagrams, and effort. There was discussion over neatness which Lilian suggested. Some students didn't feel this was appropriate. It was put to a class vote which led to its inclusion. They now had nine criteria, so Sam said that they would double the score on one of them to give 10 points. He asked the class which one they felt was the most important. The majority seemed to feel that effort was the most important. Franca, however, mentioned content. Sam again put it to a vote, and the class overwhelmingly decided on effort, with three students putting up their hands for content. Franca elaborated on what she meant by content. She said content should be judged individually for each person. She felt that content depended on the person's capability. She felt that some people were more capable than others and therefore should be judged accordingly. Sam said that these were really insightful observations. He suggested that what she was explaining was more effort than content. She agreed.

In these two sets of fieldnotesSam's talk about the fight and his discussion of evaluation criteriaSam's personal knowledge of science teaching takes shape in our observer minds. He knows science through his knowledge of people, especially his philosophy of individual difference and his respect for student knowledge. In the first set of notes, we find him transmitting his knowledge, almost pleading with students, to know themselves and others in the way he does. In the second set of notes, we find Sam fulfilling curriculum policy obligations for grading and report cards while having students both design and apply an evaluation instrument to one another. There is consistency, which we call Sam's personal philosophy of teaching, in his telling in the first set of notes and in his elicitation in the second set. Helen and Jeanette, like Sam, are known as student-oriented. Their personal philosophies show similarities to Sam's. Yet they objected to the proposed unit. Sam's philosophy alone does not explain the tension.

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Sam believes that people do different things in life and not everyone has, or needs, the same knowledge. Though he does not say so, we may surmise that Sam does not hold to the idea of each student knowing the same science knowledge, nor even to the idea that a curriculum policy might outline what knowledge is necessary and required. The project-based science unit allowed different students to learn different things, a key feature of Sam's personal philosophy. Part of the tension over the unit derives from the fact that others think the mandatory science topics will not be properly covered. This suggests a strong sense that each student should be taught the same things. Teased apart, Sam's personal philosophy appears to put him at odds with the science curriculum policy and with his two coworkers. To further understand these puzzles, we turn to place and temporality; we turn to where Sam has spent much of his teaching life and to how he is connected to in- and out-of-classroom pla;ces on the landscape. Sam provides a strong clue during a lunch conversation when he says that a proposed move to a more usual homeroom situation in another school next year will be very difficult for him. He says that after living on a farm, he found institutional life constraining. Sam was brought up on a farm, and the field trip he had planned was to his father's farm. Sam recently had sold his own farm, which he had sometimes used for school purposes. . For some years Sam had worked outside of a regular classroom in out-of-school settings and in a special education withdrawal setting. In the class arrangement described in this article, Sam, who had been a withdrawal special education teacher at Bay Street School the year before, teamed up with Helen, a homeroom teacher, and Jeanette, a teacher aide, to create a three-room complex known as the Learning Center. The center served 42 children in grades 7 and 824 regular students and 18 special education students. Instead of withdrawal, the two teachers and teacher aide constructed a complex grouping system organized around a six-day teaching cycle. Helen was known for her ability to connect with children, as was Sam, and she was known for her structure, organization, and efficiency. Helen's personality had a dramatic quality, and she was known for her ability to enchant children during her reading period. She led what one might call a disciplined, student-oriented institutional life and did well at it. Sam was used to a more independent teaching life with more flexibility and, perhaps, more spontaneity in planning. Helen and Jeanette often judged Sam negatively because his arrival and departure times were not on schedule. Furthermore, he was often out of the classroom and away from school on a variety

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of associated activities. Proper running of this complex class, from Helen's point of view, depended on careful scheduling and adherence to regular timelines. Sam knew his teaching life in a much different way than Helen knew hers. The rhythms they each lived out around the six-day cycle were visibly different. Among other things, it was the collision of these rhythms that helped to account for the different ways the two teachers knew their classroom and for the resulting tension and negative judgment. Rhythms are temporal: rhythm refers to how one experiences time, and the activities that are played out in that time.^^ Just as a person who does something outside his or her normal rhythmfor instance, arriving an hour later for workmay feel out of sorts and experience the whole day as being out of sync, one person's experience of another's rhythm may feel out of sync. Moreover, people imbue these rhythms with moral overtones: it is not only an error, it is morally wrong to violate the temporal expectations set by rhythms. Helen might judge Sam's coming late to class not only as an annoyance but also as indifference, lack of interest, and unethical behavior. Sam, on the other hand, might judge Helen's dismissal of students in the middle of a science lesson so they could arrive at their French lesson on time as inappropriate, unethical, and wrong for the students' learning. Rhythms are also connected to the landscape, to place and its circumstances. In the case of Sam and Helen, the key places are Helen's former homeroom, Sam's out-of-classroom places, especially the farm, and the Learning Center where the two teachers worked together. Helen's rhythm is connected to her experience as a homeroom teacher within the school's six-day cycle. Sam's rhythm is connected to his experience outside the classroom and outside of school. Their different experiences, and different rhythms, collide and are out of sync with one another in the Learning Center, a new place for them, a complex place requiring its own rhythms. In short, Sam and Helen are two student-oriented teachers who place children, children's social relations, and children's futures above the subject content of what is taught. Yet we find, via our somewhat kaleidoscopic look through the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, differences in time, place, and narrative history that yield unexpected tension. Time, place, and narrative history come together to create rhythms in teaching and unit planning. When different teacher rhythms collide, tension may arise.
'^F. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin, "Cycles, Rhythms and the Meaning of School Time," in Timepiece: Extending and Enhancing Learning Time, ed. L. W. Anderson and H. J. Walberg (Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals, 1993), pp. 9-14.

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Narrative Understandings of Teacher Knowledge

The Puzzles over Content and Unit Structure

Readers may have their own ideas about these puzzles. Content coverage and unit structure are expressions of Sam's knowledge. Sani teaches students to know science as he knows it, not as something in bookstrue, immutable, and externalbut as something in lifefiuid, personal, and social. The entire science unit has a sense of wholeness about it; a sense of connection with, or unity between, the world out there and the world experienced and known. We are again reminded of the chemist Polanyi's notion of personal knowledge. The trip to the farm is a climax, as are the project presentations and the principal's visit to view project work. The list of five biological curriculum areas plus rocks and minerals, and the list of topics in the student reports, make sense in terms of Sam's studentoriented, holistic view. For Sam, this one unit covers everything listed in the guidelines. Although the curriculum policy might appear to lead to lessons on one and then another topic, Sam brings the topics together in student projects involving in- and out-of-classroom activities. There are, of course, difficulties, including setbacks in the completion of projects and disputes among children. But overall, Sam is satisfied with the way the unit is completed. SACRED, SECRET, AND COVER STORIES We described the child-oriented, put-children-first attitude as part of Sam's and Helen's personal philosophy of teaching. This philosophy ultimately acts as a sacred story in the school, given the school board policies and given the new principal's approach. It would have been unimaginable in this context for someone to say that whether the students like it or not, they have to learn this or that. Of course, teachers did follow the curriculum guidelines and did believe that students needed to learn thingsscience, for example. But no one put subject matter over students. There were, of course, many things hidden from public view secret stories obscured by cover stories. In part, the way teachers told others about the Learning Center was a cover story. The story covered up some of the secret stories of tension between Sam and Helen. Sam's science unit, looked at from Helen's perspective, was a cover story. Sam was able to report that all the science required by policy had been covered. But a close examination of instructional details would show huge differences between students in terms of their learning and between the coverage of some topics. Classification, for example, received more direct instructional time than some other topics. It might be said that Sam's cover story permitted him to keep his philosophy and temporal rhythms intact while at the same

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time providing him with a formal defense, a cover story, for his science curriculum. The cover story was that the Learning Center was working well on behalf of children. The teachers kept the secret stories safe and shared them with few others beyond ourselves. A REFLECTIVE LOOK BACK loViLJLy^ To make sense of this notion of teacher knowledge, readers need to work out the ideas for themselves as appropriate to their own landscapes, in terms of their own narrative histories. We want to take the study of teaching out of its cloak of formalistic terms, abstract language, and distant methodologies. To that end, this article, with its description of some of the real-life drama of the Learning Center, seeks to convey the ordinary, everyday quality of teaching life. Like He's study of Chinese women immigrants and Phillion's study of an urban elementary school teacher and her classroom, the Learning Center story is a helpful reminder of the everyday quality of what it is we want to capture when we think narratively about teacher knowledge.
F. MICHAEL CONNELLY works at the Center for Teacher Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. D. JEAN CLANDININ works at the Center for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta.

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