Story as an Organizing and Inquiry Tool for Public Scholarship on Partnerships in Urban Education

• In Event: Frameworks and Tools for Critical Discourse in Teacher Education

Abstract

Story is theorized and enacted to foster classroom community, engagement in schools, and participation in social movements. However, the literature offers few examples of story as a means to study and promote urban education partnerships for social justice. This paper examines student, teacher, teacher educator, and community educator participation in an urban education partnership that organizes and analyzes itself through story. Through storying practices and the creation of a dystopian novel, the values, perspectives, and socio-political realities of those practitioners reveal how partnership efforts to support their voices in top-down times spur more memorable learning, improved communication across organizations and contexts, a shared culture of empowerment, and social innovations in schools that are community-based and globally aware.

Author

• Mark Kohan, University of Connecticut