Professional Taleworlds: In-Service Teachers Use of Small Stories as Participation in Knowledge Construction and Critical Reflection of the Sociopolitical Contexts of Education

This dissertation study takes up a narrative approach, grounded in both critical and feminist pedagogies, to explore how in-service teachers use small stories to participate in knowledge construction and critical reflection on issues of the sociopolitical contexts of education. Further, this study sits at an intersection of teacher learning and culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogies, centering teachers as transformative intellectuals by examining in-service teachers’ small stories as a pathway to enacting de/colonizing pedagogies within teacher education.Small story is a narrative approach placing epistemological and analytical emphasis on the stories told in everyday conversational interactions, which are often fragmentary, unpolished, and less coherent than the “big stories” elicited via narrative interviews. The conversational data for this study were drawn from a graduate course designed to support teachers in thinking about the sociopolitical contexts of education. Twelve in-service teachers meeting in four small groups participated in weekly online, synchronous dialogue sessions as part of a course requirement. Learnings from the study suggest that teachers tell a range of small story genres for a variety of purposes. Some genres are congruent with story types described in the literature, while other genres seem to be distinct to the teaching profession. Learnings also suggest that small stories can function as learning spaces for teachers in which they engage in non-linear and communal reflection processes. The data further suggest that small stories, as pedagogical tools, offer a view of teacher learning and perspective transformation that occurs on a micro timescale and in deictic contexts.

Author

• Brusseau, Rebecca

• critical reflection
• culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy
• feminist
• narrative
• small story
• teacher learning

Identifier

hdl:1920/14004

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14004