Narrative inquiry: A tool to promote learning of child development

This is a study by a teacher educator examining how narrative inquiry can be adopted to promote learning of child development. Based on Connelly & Clandinin’s (1988) narrative perspective, teacher knowledge can be understood by storytelling. The participants and I are engaged in telling our narratives of experience related to our growth and development from childhood. Such experiences give meaning to how developmental changes occur, and serve to answer the questions such as who we are and why we are today. Since narrative is an effective way of organizing our experience of time, narrative inquiry is employed in this study to derive meaning from the stories themselves and to understand what we know and how we know about children’s development.