Navigating the Community College Landscape: Toward Relationship and Community.

This is a qualitative community college landscape study using historical details and temporal qualities to point out the challenges and dilemmas of applying curriculum to real-world experience. The author uses the concreteness of the Canadian community college context and her own experience there to talk about student/teacher relationships, teacher identity and community, curriculum, and adult education. This study is based on the authors teaching experience in the community college system. It draws on curricular issues and the narratives of three female community college students who were participants in the study. Chapter 1, "Teaching Touchstones: Community, Conversation, and Curriculum," introduces the authors early teaching experiences. Chapter 2, "Crossing the Border into Post-Secondary Education," analyzes curriculum planning and raises questions about the intersection between theory and practice in the classroom. Chapter 3, "In the Literature: Looking for Terra Firma," is a review of the literature on adult education. Chapter 4, "In the Literature and Out of Bounds," continues to contextualize this examination. Chapter 5, "Using Narrative Inquiry to Find Open Ground," describes the tensions lived out in the researcher/teacher inquiry. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 tell classroom stories and offer narrative reflections. Includes three appendices and 151 references. (NB)