ABSTRACT
Teachers are in a constant cycle of developing, trying, assessing, and revising curriculum. Engaging in narrative inquiry to examine the impact of a new approach does not eliminate confirmation bias. Additionally, narrative inquiry can allow the teacher researcher to develop a richer picture of how children interact with a new curriculum and allow a finer grained analysis than the initial impression of "it's working" or "it's a failure". Narrative inquiry can also supplement and enrich the quantitative measures of success or failure that are more commonly used to measure children's progress and provide insight into how children make progress over time in relation to curriculum, teacher, classmates, and the classroom environment. Emergent curriculum refers most broadly to a curriculum that follows and supports children's interests, experiences, and talents. In most elementary school settings, teachers are not entirely free to determine the curriculum based on their ongoing inquiry into students' ideas and interactions.
