ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explore the influence of class dynamics in Ivor Goodson’s identity and work. It considers how perspectives of social class drive and shape Goodson’s theory and practice and raise general questions about maintaining a working-class identity whilst being an academic and a public intellectual. Dialogical narrative encounters, or pedagogical exchanges, create space and opportunity for a third ‘voice’ to emerge: ‘the voice of collaboration between people involved in the narrative encounter’. Goodson has also worried long and loudly about the danger in the ‘narrative turn’ towards subjectivity and the potential misuse of narrative data ‘exacerbated by the uncoupling of narratives from their social location and historical context’. He argues always for life history over life story in developing ‘stories of action within theories of context’. The variations on a theme of ‘fun’ as a key characteristic of a dialogic, interactive pedagogy, permeate Goodson’s work.
