Cover image JPG. Full text TXT. Dublin Core XML. Schools are pivotal social institutions for the present and future of the communities that they serve. Students attend schools in order to learn to better their lives and the lives of all that surround them. Within schools, teachers are central to this learning. While there are many inputs that structure work in classrooms, it is teachers who are the orchestrators of what students do.
Increasingly, though, the work of teachers is strongly influenced by curriculum standards and accountability systems created by external authorities. The results are displacing: teachers and their students are positioned to grow disconnected from the communities in which they work and live.
Although teachers are positioned as displacing agents in this educational setup, they have been strongly shaped by particular places. Indeed, all people possess a living course of learning experiences--a living curriculum--that has taken place.
Learning is inherently embedded in a social context. As place is constructed by one's relationships to one's social surroundings social, political, cultural, ecological, etc. Across a lifetime, then, people undergo a course of learning in places. A segment of this living curriculum that a teacher possesses is a teaching curriculum, which is a living course that is specific to learning to teach.
Experiences in various places, from the schools in a teacher's youth to the school at which a teacher teaches in the present, shape this teaching curriculum. Experiences outside of schools also influence it. Even if asked to teach a displacing content curriculum, a teacher has experienced a course of learning in places. In this study, I examine how three teachers are emplaced in their lives and in their teaching. Each is a public school teacher in a different region of the U.
