A Digital Narrative Inquiry Into a Beginning Teacher's "Stories to Live By" in Rural China

• In Event: Novice Teachers’ Experiences in High-Needs International Contexts

Abstract

Many of the most challenging issues in the education of China are rooted in its rural areas with high poverty. The number of teachers in high-poverty areas dropped from 4.7 million to 3.3 million from 2010-2013 (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2015). Among those who are teaching in rural areas, 36.7 percent are considering leaving the teaching profession (Chinese Rural Education Research Center, 2016). These numbers indicate that teacher attrition in rural China is more a matter of failing to sustain teachers. Furthermore, 51.2 percent of rural teachers began teaching without knowledge of poverty-ridden context. Additionally, there were 61 million rural children living with the absence of their parents in 2013, while 46.74% of those parents were working in labor intensive fields in cities, entailing issues on children’s physical and mental development. Therefore, teachers frequently also play parents’ roles when they teach. Rural teachers’ overloaded work is worsened by the high-accountability evaluation system. The insufficient resources for professional development leave rural teachers on their own to survive. This study tells and retells a novice teacher’s stories of gaining his own growth when teaching in a rural school with a shortage of resources.
This study employs digital narrative inquiry as an approach to explore a beginning teacher’s “stories to live by”, experiences of sustaining himself. Digital storytelling, integrating stories with images and videos of participants’ daily lives, provides a space for teachers to reflectively see what happened in his personal and professional landscapes, to develop inquiries that have not occurred and to empower people to make choices regarding how they want to relive their stories in the future. Fei, the participant teacher who began teaching in August 2016, has recorded his experiences daily with students in and out of classroom via pictures and videos for one year. Fei talked about his own views and experiences presented in the digital materials, selected materials together by negotiating with his students and made a digital story on his own.
This digital inquiry process developed Fei’s multilayered understanding of what were the schooling lives that his students liked and did not like and how might those likes and dislikes connect with students’ lives outside school. Fei started questioning his previous assumptions of what should be done in classroom and what he thought was best for students. The digital inquiry process created a visual and reflective space that narrowed the gap between the participant teacher who came from city and students who lived in poverty. The growth and changes in the digital inquiry process also helped Fei find ways to enrich his “best-loved self” (Schwab, 1978) in the future. However, the digital inquiry process did not operate as a straight road, but as a route of Fei coming back and forth and negotiating the identity of who he was and what he wants to be. The study provides the implication that when given the chance, teachers in high needs contexts use digital inquiry to create space for self-educating, fostering their connections with students, and sustaining themselves.

Author

• Jing Li, East China Normal University