Mindful Transformation Within Educational Reform: Identity (Re)construction Through Narrative Thinking

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Narratives of Teachers: Grand, Cultural, and Messy

Abstract

Large-scale educational reforms aim at achieving a fundamental paradigm shift in how the society considers educational assumptions, ideas, and goals, challenging conventional and traditional beliefs systems and practices. The social transformation is a collective contribution of individual transformations. However, individual teachers situated in such reform contexts, targeted as the ones “to be reformed”, usually struggle to negotiate their original belief systems associating directly with their challenged self-identity of why they being a teacher. This paper explores how a psychological perspective shift and development of a critical historical view in individual transformation, usually happening in interacting with narrative scenarios, could facilitate teachers autonomously to question and revise held mindsets in a holistic and critical way, and hence help larger social transformation.

Authors

• Wen-Ting Chung, Arizona State University

• Sarah K. Brem, Arizona State University

• Jenefer E. Husman, Arizona State University

• Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University