"I Remember This One Time": Veteran Teachers Constructing and Challenging Sociocultural Knowledge Through Narrative

• In Event: Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge: Explorations of How Teachers Conceptualize and Enact Culture Across Contexts

Abstract

Teachers often struggle to effectively draw upon sociocultural knowledge in their teaching practice (Milner, 2017; Papola-Ellis, 2016; Wetzel et al., 2019). Centering Brown’s (2013) theorizing of HCSK as improvisational, situated, and all-encompassing, this paper considers how stories of teaching might serve as curricular texts that construct and represent HCSK. In addition to using HCSK as a theoretical lens, this paper draws on theorizing of narrative-in-interaction (Bamberg, 2006; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008), centering the telling of narrative as social practice. Story serves as a discursive tool through which we (re)produce and disrupt hegemonic ideologies about race, language, and culture (Razfar, 2012; Souto-Manning, 2014), yet minimal research has considered narrative as a site where sociocultural knowledge is shared and built amongst teachers.

The data analyzed here were generated from a study involving six veteran teachers in an urban school district in the U.S. South. These teachers, with between ten and thirty years of teaching experience, served as mentor teachers for students in a preservice teacher education program. They were invited by AuthorOne, a program faculty member, to participate in the inquiry group exploring how to center equity and anti-racism as mentors and teacher educators. Reflecting the racial demographics of the district, three teachers identified as Black, two as white, and one as Asian; AuthorOne, who facilitated discussions, identified as white. Data collected included: (a) fieldnotes and video-recordings of six group meetings; (b) audio-recordings of three interviews with each teacher; and (c) meeting artifacts, including surveys and informal writing. Drawing on theorizing of narrative-as-interaction, the author analyzed stories told during group meetings, focusing particularly on how sociocultural knowledge was constructed within and across narratives through deictics, voicing, and evaluation (Wortham & Rhodes, 2015).

This analysis revealed the primacy of narrative as a discursive genre used to construct sociocultural knowledge, exploring issues of racism and poverty by recounting both past and ongoing experiences in their teaching lives. Across six meetings, teachers told 72 such stories. Sociocultural dimensions were salient within each story, but these dimensions were often implied rather than explicitly stated. In their telling, teachers drew upon hegemonic ideologies of race and class in multiple ways, both reifying and disrupting deficit positionings of working-class students of color.
In addition to analysis of individual stories, this paper examines how teachers in the group used stories to build upon and challenge one another’s representations of students, schools, and communities. It traces the chaining of such representations across multiple narratives, considering how sociocultural knowledge is collectively built amongst teachers in interaction. These findings illustrate how sociocultural knowledge – both in humanizing and critical forms and their opposites – is shared and amongst teachers through story. Building upon scholarship on the role of narrative in teacher learning (Author & Colleagues, 2018; Sosa-Provencio et al., 2019), these findings prompt exploration of how teachers develop sociocultural knowledge through hearing and responding to stories told by teaching colleagues, as well as through analyzing their own stories.

Author

• Laura A Taylor, Rhodes College