Becoming a narrative inquirer in a multicultural landscape

Abstract

This is the last of three papers based on a 20-month study of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom in a downtown community school in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of the research was to describe the details of teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and to document successful strategies in working with immigrant and minority students. The three papers detail the process by which this focus on classroom life led to a critique of the literature and to a new way to think about multicultural teaching and learning which I call narrative multiculturalism. In this paper, I explore the process of becoming a narrative inquirer in a multicultural landscape and the implications of this way of thinking on developing new kinds of understanding. I relate this experientially oriented work to new ethnographies and other work already finding its way into the field. I explore a narrative multicultural way of thinking in greater depth. I use my own work with a teacher participant to re-imagine multicultural life in schools and classrooms. The study demonstrates the potential contribution of narrative multiculturalism to understanding multicultural life and multicultural teaching and learning.