Curriculum stories and college instructors: A narrative inquiry on college curriculum development

In this narrative inquiry, I reflected upon college instructors' experience with curriculum development through the stories of two primary participants who were in the early stages of their teaching careers at a large urban college. We defined curriculum as all that a student experiences in the learning environment, where instructors' implicit relationship with this experience-as-curriculum is made manifest in their intentions and hopes for the learning experience, and through their enactment of these in the learning environment within and beyond the classroom. Within the inquiry, curriculum development became defined as the interplay of decision-making and intention, hopes and action through which an instructor moves into a closer relationship with the curriculum.;Through our reflective exploration of the narratives we identified how these college instructors relied on faculty development activities to learn about curriculum development as well as to build community to help them navigate through the processes; the use of, and need for, power to engage in curriculum development; the tensions arising from differing philosophical perspectives amongst colleagues who were teaching and developing curriculum together; the impact of institutional and personal commitment on their identity as college instructors and their curriculum development efforts; and the leadership needed and expected in the process of curriculum development. In the end, I learned that these seemingly contextual elements were experienced as central to the curriculum development process itself.;I met each participant over the course of one year in a sequence of informal conversations and formal audio-taped and transcribed interviews of one and a half to two hours in length. They received a list of focusing questions regarding their experiences with college curriculum development prior to our first meeting: subsequent meetings used a reflective process to further explore their unfolding curriculum development stories. From the stories of the two primary participants, and from my own reflections on being a college instructor, I created mini-narratives which were then shared with three experienced instructors at the same college. In my meetings with each of these instructors we shared our own stories of curriculum development and reflected upon the re-storied accounts of our newer colleagues.