Storywork and Collectivizing Teacher Education Toward Family Futures in Thailand

• In Event: Reimagining Teachers as Critical Mediators and Theorists of Learning Within Complex Political and Ethical Ecologies

Abstract

Schools and teachers exist within sociocultural and sociopolitical entanglements of power that operate at various scales – ideological, structural, and socially-constructed in micro-interactions, in how teachers hear, talk, and treat students’ ideas and cultural practices (Erickson, 2004; Vossoughi & Booker, 2017, Nespor, 1997). They grapple with pedagogical choices in the face of constant demands of the nation-state and global agendas and yet are also the ones to imagine new possibilities for the purposes of school. This paper explores the creation of teacher collectives in one urban Indigenous school in Thailand called Sahasatsuksa school through the stories teachers told to each other. It illustrates how collective storywork - the interrelated process of storytelling and storylistening - opens up more humanizing and equitable forms of teaching and learning, not just with students, but among teachers themselves (Archibald, 2008). Million (2014) writes that “[Stories] are a felt knowledge that accumulates and becomes a force that empowers stories that are otherwise separate to become a focus, a potential for movement” (p. 31-32). Through bringing “otherwise separate” stories of teachers together, I ask: How do teachers’ ethical and political development trajectories shift over time through storywork?
I use micro-ethnography to analyze two storywork events in 2015 and 2017, where 17 teachers shared stories of their lives and reflected on their work with each other. These stories exist within a larger participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) where teachers were implementing a pedagogy called Tutoría to enact more mutually humanizing student-teacher relations rather than powered top-down learning relationships (Cámara et al, 2018; Rincón-Gallardo & Elmore, 2012). Through layered learning (Mendoza, 2014), designing for teachers’ expansive view of children’s full lives, also meant our design needed to consider the full lives and complex personhood of teachers. Such orientations to the cultural, political, and ethical lives of teachers and young people often runs against the backdrop of Thai national education policies and global education reforms that continue to uphold colonial, neoliberal, and capitalistic agendas that require the assimilation of children to a singular set of criteria and control the bounds of permissible sense-making (Rogoff, 2003; Buadaeng & Leepreecha, 2009).
Across the 34 stories, I find that teachers’ process of storywork illustrate the ways heteroglossic imaginaries of learning based from within teachers’ sociocultural ecologies strengthened collective resolve to design towards families’ futures at school. Teachers making sense of their own roles and responsibilities to state-directives, young people, families, and tribes in increasingly heterogeneous ways mattered for collective sense-making and social dreaming at school (Espinoza, 2008). Further, teachers’ reflective sense-making made visible the ethical and political deliberations of pedagogical choices that come with attempting to challenge formal constraints of colonizing and homogenizing school practices. This paper further theorizes the role of storywork in teacher education (Marin & Bang, 2015; Sengupta, Redman & Enyedy, 2013) and underscores their relational implications in creating and carrying diverse collectives in schools that have the potential to shift the purposes of school towards family and community ends, and ultimately destabilize educational hegemonies

Author

• Meixi *, University of Minnesota