| Drawing Maxine Greene's idea of education as a "quest for a better state of things for our students and the world we all share," this study investigates the life stories of four diverse young women who attended the same public high school in a suburb of New York. As narrative inquiry, the study is motivated in part by a desire to explore departures from a common arc in classroom narratives, "magic wand tales," in which teachers recount sudden, miraculous transformations of students during arts-related lessons. While devoting considerable attention to the contexts of their learning experiences, both in and of the school, the four participants in this study recount experiences of acquiring (or not acquiring) multiple literacies, and learning (or not learning) in and through the arts. Their vignettes range from earliest attachments to storybooks to recent encounters with art installations; meanwhile, in the researcher's presentation, their interview stories alternate with such artifacts as blog entries, journal entries, photographs, and folktales. The author considers these ethnographic narratives in relation to some young-adult quest fictions introduced by the participants themselves (Golden Compass, Sailor Moon); she also draws on other well-known quest fictions (Song of Solomon, Moby Dick, Don Quixote). Several motifs in these fictions---compass codes; traveling companions; meetings with strangers--serve to extend and elaborate on the idea of teaching-and-learning as a quest. The study is framed by Bakhtin's theory of chronotope, which suggests that the treatments of time and space in a narrative tend to reflect broader world-views and beliefs about human potential. In a reflexive review of the study, the author departs from the quest, and turns to the genre of the murder mystery, specifically Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, exploring Pamuk's motif of miniaturist-as-murder, as a metaphor for the complications of rendering another person's "life story." In the concluding discussion, the author considers implications of this work for narrative inquiry, curriculum design, conceptions of literacy, and classroom teaching practices. |
