On the narrative of challenged assumptions

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which the construction of the narrative of music education was problematised through pre-service teachers' and an academic's engagement with a self-assessment project. While the self-assessment tasks afforded a place through which students were able to interrogate their personal construction of assessment and what it means to demonstrate knowings, larger concerns remained unaddressed and less documented. A key issue was the ways in which what had first been a seemingly “simple” qualitative design was overridden by larger philosophical and methodological concerns. What had seemed an obvious process of culling themes from narratives to document growth, development, and turning points soon disintegrated as the author realized the need to attend not only to which and what story to tell, but who had a say in telling the story, and how the story was to be told.