Samia Costandi

A Palestinian Canadian Educator's Narrative Inquiry Samia Costandi

This book explores the life and work of a philosophy of education and multicultural education teacher, through the use of narrative inquiry. As a Palestinian/Lebanese Canadian researcher, teacher, mother, activist and writer, Dr Costandi presents the journey of freeing herself from colonial grand narratives through the construction of her personal, practical knowledge and values, while providing an answer to the question: ?What does it mean to be situated on the boundary between the English West and the Middle Eastern Arab world?? Dr Costandi demonstrates how the Orientalist tradition, as defined by Edward Said (1978), served to confuse, frustrate, and alienate her as an embodied person situated within a web of historical, ethnic, linguistic, social, and cultural tensions. She describes how, having been educated in an English missionary school in the context of a Palestinian culture of dispossession and Diaspora, this education served to paradoxically both estrange and enrich her. Narrative inquiry, modeled after Clandinin and Connelly (2000), has enabled her to understand and communicate who she really is as an educator in the multiple social contexts she has known.