Schools as Made Works

Building on Carini’s idea of works bearing the imprint of their makers and using an example from my work in educator education that illustrates how Descriptive Inquiry can be a means of making and remaking a body of thought and practice, I explore the large idea of schools as made work. Through the exploration of the college faculty into race, I describe three metaphors that guided and shaped my thinking as I grew to understand what the participants in this inquiry and I had made together. Through this article, I make the political argument that values that support a humane approach to education—an approach that recognizes that how we see one another’s capacities is basic to all that we do or do not do in schools, an approach that acknowledges that the stories we tell ourselves about people and history are often incomplete and even wrong—are under duress at this time. To stay on course, we all need a place to work with others to expand and strengthen our thinking. The places that we work, particularly if they are schools, need to be places that create the kind of spaces needed for this strengthening. People in schools need to hold the shared recognition of the importance and possibility of intentionally constructing the educational space and share a trust in the tools they use for that building.