| Abstract
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Bumping against dominant school stories of teacher as subject matter specialist and stories of mandated assessment that shaped the professional knowledge landscapes of schools in Turkey, I felt uncertain about how to make the lives of the youth I taught, and their families, part of my classroom curriculum making. In Canada, positioned as a teacher and coach, I had come to know curriculum as something relationally composed and made with youth and families. As I attended to my experiences in this unfamiliar context, I became interested in the ways classroom curriculum making shaped, and is shaped by, individuals' identities. Attending from the perspectives of children, their families and teacher as they negotiated their lives within a curriculum of lives, this narrative inquiry multiperspectivally explores the experiences of children situated in a Canadian school. The study was situated on a school landscape being shifted by a growing diversity in the Canadian population as well as a rising focus upon assessment-driven accountability. My field texts include field notes as a participant observer in the classroom over a 10 month period, tape recorded and field noted conversations with the teacher, the children and their families, and samples of the children's written work, art work, and photography projects. Research texts were composed with the children as main characters informed by attending to their lives in relation with their families and the teacher. The dissertation provides narrative accounts of Lilly, Dana, and Owen, the children who participated in the inquiry. Looking across the narrative accounts, I pulled forward tensions which resonated among them around the negotiation of curriculum making. Exploring the relational tensions shaping the children's lives and their interactions in curriculum making, I considered the ways tension may be understood as educative and as a part of curriculum making. When a curriculum of lives is negotiated, the negotiations are tension-filled, a process that asks all of us, children, teachers, families, researchers, to think about who we are in relation with each other and with the larger milieu.
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