Finding voice : forty-five years of struggle to keep a community school

Stacey, Kathleen (2002) Finding voice : forty-five years of struggle to keep a community school. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The school in the small outport community of Lawn, on the Burin Peninsula in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, has been an integral part of the community, and the community of the school, since its earliest inception, however, several efforts at school consolidation by a series of school authorities have created a fundamental battle ground for community residents. Since 1956, at which time the high school students from Lawn were bussed thirteen kilometers to St Lawrence, there has been an ongoing community struggle to preserve the Lawn K - 12 school system. This thesis tells the multi-layered story of a small community's struggle to save its school with a particular focus on the reasons for the passion which motivated it. -- After the introduction, and a preliminary overview of the academic literature of small schools in Chapter Two, the chapters of this thesis are arranged chronologically to narrate the Lawn school story over its entire history with a focus on the critical periods and the major conflictual events. Chapters Three, Four, and Five are each divided into six sections which depict, sequentially, the multiple layers of the story: the historical landscape of education in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, the local situation in Lawn, the public version of the school authority story, the Lawn residents' story, the author's personal school story, and finally the narrative researcher's reflections and ruminations of the multiple layers of each chapter. This pattern of development continues until Chapter Six when the Lawn residents' story begins to merge with the school board story and are told in unison, and consequently, only five sections are developed in this chapter. Chapter Seven tells the author's journey of becoming a narrative researcher and learning a narrative methodology.

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