A Timescape: personal narratives - professional spaces

This chapter examines the ways in which narrative accounts of educators' thinking can be used both conceptually and methodologically to understand and provoke adult learning in early childhood settings. Drawing on research conducted by the authors, the chapter emphasises the growing irrelevance of traditional single session professional development. Increasingly, educational contexts demand pedagogical thoughtfulness and analytical reflection in order to meet the challenges of multiple communites living in complex spaces. The professional growth of educators has thus become one "of the proliferation of arenas in which the often unexpectedly aggressive if subtle action of narrative is now found to be at work" (Nash, 1990, p. xii).