Identity as Teachers of Inquiry Science: Small Stories and Interpretive Repertoires as Discursive Resources

• In Event: Roundtable Session 111
  In Roundtable Session: Helping Students and Teachers to Find Their Voice

Abstract

In this paper, we privilege small stories, the fleeting, everyday narratives that have often been ignored in narrative identity research. Adopting Bamberg’s (2011) redefined positioning analysis, we examine a collaborative narration between two teachers within the context of a professional development group discussion. Following through three levels of analysis, we demonstrate identity work as being grounded in talk-in-interaction, and also explicate the identification of interpretive repertoires that co-articulate forms of identity within the dilemmatic space of agency. We identify performative and pragmatist repertoires as discursive resources mobilized by Singaporean primary science teachers in their talk about the dilemmas of inquiry teaching.

Authors

• Frederick Toralballa Talaue, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University

• Mijung Kim, University of Victoria

• Aik-Ling Tan, Nanyang Technological University