Learning Stories

Margaret Carr is a Professor of Education at the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand. Before she joined the Faculty of Education at Waikato, she was a geographer at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, where there was a strong focus by the professors on social and cultural change. This formed a background for her interest in the role of education in society, and in Hamilton she gained a qualification in early childhood education and worked as a kindergarten teacher before becoming a lecturer in education at the university. Her PhD thesis was entitled 'Technological Practice in Early Childhood as a Dispositional Milieu'. New Zealand has provided a number of opportunities for professors to research with early childhood teachers on topics chosen by the teachers, and Margaret has frequently published with teachers. Learning Stories as an assessment practice was developed for the 1996 Te Whariki bicultural curriculum (later revised in 2017); the development of narrative assessment is told in the 2001 Sage book, Assessment in Early Childhood Settings: Learning Stories, and further developed in the 2012 Sage book Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education. The latter book was co-authored with Wendy Lee, and this partnership has combined academic and professional wisdom in many publications and presentations over many years.