Parallel Stories of Publicly Imagined and Personally Lived Physical Education Teacher Identity Reconstruction in the Time of COVID-19

• In Event: Creative Narrative Expressions During COVID-19

Abstract

Using the parallel stories method, this narrative inquiry unfolds publicly told stories of Korean PE teachers and personally lived Korean PE teacher stories in pairs. It reveals how public narratives imagine post-pandemic PE teacher identity and how individual PE teachers engage in multiple voices amid the emergency shift to online/blended teaching during the pandemic in South Korea. The findings shed light on two main narrative plots that string the public imaginations and the personal experiences of being a teacher in their respective ways but never meet like parallel lines. The paper ends with a brief discussion of how resilient teachers sustain their ‘best-loved selves’ while embracing the multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways of teaching and being in increasingly challenging educational contexts.

Author

• HyeSeung Lee, Texas A&M University
  Presenting Author