Naming Silenced Lives

In an effort to call attention to the experiences of people who traditionally have been left out of the educational mainstream, "Naming Silenced Lives" presents a series of autobiographical histories which demonstrate how educational organizations often marginalize and silence different groups--be they inner city youths, Athabaskan elders, Black teachers, Navajo teachers, or gay and lesbian faculty. Each chapter examines the way in which a specific group has been silenced by various educational arrangements, considers the import of using autobiographies and other narrative methods to alter individuals' received circumstances and describes how this naming of silenced lives and relationships to educational institutions has effected change. Part one of the volume sets the stage for a discussion of personal narrative, oral history and critical theory in the study of educational institutions. Part two undertakes analyses of various individuals and the contexts inwhich they find themselves in education, utilizing the theoretical and methodological constructs outlined in the first part to ground in concrete practice the development of personal narratives for influencing change in schools and colleges. The final section sketches an emergent typology of life histories that enables teachers, students, educational researchers and the researched to analyze and transform, rather than merely serve, prevailing logic in schools and the wider social order. By using the approach that education's participants and organizations operate within on-going patterns of struggle that embody competing conceptions of what counts for knowledge, the text refuses to remain mired in modes of analysis thatexamine educational life from the singular perspective of effectiveness and efficiency. Instead, "Naming Silenced Lives" is a dialectical interaction of theory and method with policy and practice. Contributors highlight how theory mediates between education's constituencies and the larger social reality. Seen in this light, education is investigated not merely as a functionalist tool of effectiveness, but rather as a cacophony of voices mediated within different layers of reality and shaped by an interaction of dominant and subordinate forms of power. At the core of this approach remains the recognition that power, knowledge, ideology and culture are inextricably linked to one another in constantly changing patterns and relationships. Contributors: William G. Tierney, Margaret D. LeCompte, Yvonna S. Lincoln, Beth Myers, Andrew Gitlin, Ardra Cole, Ivor Goodson, Daniel McLaughlin, Patricia J. Gumport, Michele Foster, Grace Mest Szepkouski, and Peter McLaren.