The Edge of Messy: Interplays of Daily Storytelling and Grand Narratives in Teacher Learning

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

Abstract

This study examines the interplay of daily storytelling and societal narratives of teaching in one student teacher’s experience. Drawing on narrative and poststructural theories, I conducted a case study using narrative inquiry and ethnographic methods to examine the moment-to-moment storytelling of one student teacher across a range of teaching and learning contexts. Findings demonstrate that initial story themes, coupled with the tools and positions available and taken up, contributed to evolving narratives of what counting in teaching. Findings also include the ways pervasive, societal storylines about teaching affected learning in ways that sometimes undermined the student teacher’s original intentions to disrupt teaching narratives that focus on reductive notions of teaching and diverse groups of students.

Author

• Makenzie Selland, Utah Valley University