The Role of Narratives in Teacher Professional Discourse

• In Event: 58.050 - Teacher Discussions of Problems of Practice: Conceptualizing and Investigating "Productive" Pedagogical Discourse

Abstract

Objectives
Embedded teacher narratives, the stories that teachers tell one another in naturally occurring professional conversations, both represent problems of practice and construct participants’ identities. Through analysis of a narrative-rich teacher team meetings, we ask: What roles do teacher narratives play? What are their affordances and constraints for representing practice and for identity construction?
Theoretical framework
Teacher narratives have been investigated primarily as modes for representing practice (e.g. Horn, 2010; Horn & Little, 2010) or as means of eliciting or negotiating identities (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2001). Building on sociolinguistic research on “small stories” and embedded narratives (see e.g. Ochs, 2004; Georgakopoulou, 2006), and recent studies of naturally occurring teacher narratives (e.g. Downey, 2015; Pulvermacher & Lefstein, 2016), we look at the implications of teacher embedded narratives for both learning and identity (cf. Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Wortham, 2006).
Methods and data sources
In the development year of a design based implementation research project about teacher professional leadership and discourse in one large Israeli school district, we conducted participant observations in, and audio recorded, 118 weekly meetings of ten teacher teams in four schools. The team for which we collected the most data (18 meetings averaging 90 minutes each) is also one that was extremely narrative-rich.
We investigate the forms and functions of teacher narratives within their immediate contexts, by focusing closely on all of the narratives embedded in one team’s corpus. What are the stories about? What are their explicit and implicit messages? How do they serve to represent practice? How do they position the narrator and other teachers? How are they taken up by other members of the group?
The research methodology includes:
(1) Identification of all narratives in the data set
(2) Coding of narratives by type (e.g. “heroic success with a difficult student,” “personal background narrative”) and function (e.g. “supporting a speaker,” “disagreeing with an idea,”)
(3) Examination of collocations in narrative clusters - when there is a chain of narratives, what is the interplay among them?
(4) Close analysis of select narrative clusters, using linguistic ethnographic methods (Rampton, Maybin, & Roberts, 2015)
Results
Initial results suggest that narratives do not function primarily as representations of practice to be probed and explored, but rather as unelaborated personal tales. When a narrative does present a problem of practice that is taken up in the discourse, it can spawn a series of narratives which accomplish dual tasks: it offers a means for teachers to mitigate disagreements, bolster their public image and protect that of their colleague, and it reveals the types of practical knowledge that they hold, value and share, as teachers construct and enact identity in interaction.
Scholarly significance
Research on teacher narratives has tended to focus on elicited narratives, while embedded narratives have been attended to primarily as representations of practice. This study highlights the teacher narrative as a sophisticated communicative tool with implications for teacher learning and identity.

Authors

• Aliza Segal, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Dana Vedder-Weiss, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

• Adam Lefstein, Ben Gurion University of the Negev