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This chapter revisits and examines the experience of working with a new senior level administrator who failed to understand their role on the team. This was further compounded by the administrator’s inability to establish trust and rapport, assimilate into an established organizational culture, and empower staff. Additionally, this administrator’s style could best be described as managing instead of leading. This failure to assess and learn the group dynamics of the team resulted in a lack of buy-in and a visceral decrease in team morale. Change was swift and fast, but not transformational. Within 14 months of the hire of the new senior administrator, two office support staff assistants resigned and four of the six associate/assistant directors within the office resigned. Within two years, the senior administrator resigned. The authors will provide remedies that will assist future leaders in similar situations in making better decisions, as well as provide examples of ways to connect with staff and implement change together.

In this chapter, we think about shifting stories of research as our experience of relational methodology through narrative leads us to think differently about our work together – our research relationship and responsibility to one another as colleagues, as well as our participants. We inquire into the ways our relational methods of narrative inquiry have continued to compose shared, sustaining stories of research and research community, support our own curriculum making and identity-making experiences, and provoke our respective thinking in new ways. We revisit Aoki’s metaphor of planned and lived experiences to think about the ways that research is lived out in our lives and the complexities of sense-making about research and ourselves as researchers. Research-as-experience can be viewed as a lived curriculum of research, which interrupts the dominant narrative of research-as-plan and acts as a counterstory of research. Research-as-experience is not a static research plan that must be implemented but rather a course of lives within the context of research to be experienced. This perspective recognized that research shifts, just as the lives and identities of our participants shift. Our plans for our participants within our research cannot contain their shifting identities and must shift with them in order to honour their experience. Our work together helped us to understand that it is only through relationship with our research participants and each other that we could approach a deep understanding of their experiences and the narratives they shared about those experiences.

In this chapter, we inquire into our ever-unfolding experiences as teachers and with teacher research participants in order to explore the complexities of curriculum making in teacher education. In doing so, we lay the foundation for understanding narrative inquiry as both theory and method as such, frame our work in this volume. Curriculum making, a term introduced by Joseph Schwab, reflects the dynamic process of learning in which the teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu interact. Moreover, we think about the ways people make sense of themselves, identity-making, in the process of curriculum making. Through Derek’s experiences with Lee, a previous Grade five student, and Cindy’s work with Jesse, a research participant, we inquire into their curriculum making and identity-making. We argue that in schools, there are multiple curricula in the making, going beyond the formal notions of curriculum as grade-level standards or classroom objectives. In our inquiry process, we consider experiences in schools through Aoki’s understanding of curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum. In his writing, Aoki noted that the lived experience of curriculum in schools is much more complex and varied than the planned curriculum that is meant for a generalized audience; students and teachers bring their lives with them into particular contexts that indelibly shape the ways that curriculum is lived out. As well, we think about the ways experiences and places shape teachers and researchers and the ways we see the world.

In this chapter, I explicate the engagement of poetic expression as research analysis to understand more deeply and to represent more rigorously the experience of research participants within educational research. As a tool of analysis, poetry has the strength to disrupt expectations and invite multiple interpretations of research. Here, I articulate a methodology for engaging poetic expression fully as a tool of narrative research to reach beyond textual analysis and representation of participants’ conversations into a deeper expression of their stories to live by. Poetic expression of narrative research is the particular emphasized, which is to say that meaning-making facilitated by poetic expression relies on a consistent and minute focus on the particular. Through poetic expression of research, thoroughly member-checked by participants, I surface and make evident my position as a researcher within the research. This chapter identifies ways in which poetic expression of research invites voice on multiple levels. The poetic expression of research within a narrative inquiry makes visible the experience of the research as an unfolding experience itself for the participant, the researcher, and the reader. I demonstrate the ways in which infusing a narrative inquiry with the poetic expression of research provokes the researcher as well as the reader to draw deeply on personal experience to make sense of the research. Furthermore, poetic expression of research invites participation from readers to engage poetically with the research and become a subsequent co-participant/researcher as they make sense, themselves, of the poetic expressions of research.

Researchers have discovered that service learning affects students’ academic, personal, and social development. However, currently there is a gap in literature analyzing ways in which service learning affects students’ perceived leadership skills. This study examined the effectiveness of service learning on the perceived leadership skills of 74 sport management undergraduate students at a mid-sized, Midwestern, public university using Kouzes’ and Posner’s Student Leadership Practices Inventory instrument, which examines leadership practices in five areas: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. The results of this study may help faculty members and administrators to better understand the potential of utilizing service learning projects in their classrooms as a vehicle for their students to develop quality leadership practices. Recommendations for further research and practice are also discussed.