Teacher Stories and Storytelling Through a Storytelling Project

• In Event: Comunidad Por Medio de Cuentos: Community-Centered Storytelling and Story-Gathering Praxis

Abstract

Urban education research, data and scholarship is generally student-centered and -driven––rightfully so. As a result, rich narratives and stories about the teachers and workforce that teach public school students offer important insight and add diverse perspectives to the scholarship. After all, teachers’ lived experiences inform their teaching praxis and relationship with students.

This paper is based on a qualitative study and storytelling project about a unique population of public school teachers—alumni community teachers––who are both alumni of public schools and local public school teachers in the borough, community and neighborhood they are from and continue to live. Through professional development workshops that explore writing and counternarrative storytelling, teacher-participants reflected on their lived experiences by sharing through oral qualitative interviews and written stories.

Recently, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been misunderstood, vilified and inaccurately represented in media and popular dialogue. However, there is a long, evidence-based history on the utility of CRT’s storytelling methods and story-gathering praxis, which draws explicitly on the lived experiences of People of Color. Such methods include family histories, cenarios, biographies, chronicles, narratives, parables, cuentos, testimonios, and contranarrativas.

This study found that (1) community teachers who were homegrown in this city lived in the same or similar communities to where they grew up and teach in similar schools as those they are alumni of, whenever possible; (2) there is an overall positive correlation and impact of having attended public schools and having been taught by public school teachers as students themselves, which ultimately shaped their own self-conceptualizations as teachers; (3) the importance of self-reflection for this sample of community teachers—in both this study and benchmarks throughout their lives—ultimately shaped and informed conceptualizations of self, teaching pedagogy, and praxis; and (4) one way to engage, retain, and support emerging teachers of color nationally is to start locally and focus on public school alumni, as alumni community teachers are representative of the majority of the public school student population.

This paper will explore the purpose and function of stories through the creation of retratos of teacher-research-participants achieved through a weaving of oral stories captured via interviews and interpersonal conversations, reflective writing generated in professional development workshops, and knowledge centered on CRT, feminist, Chicana and queer studies.

At first glance, retratos is a literal translation of “portraits” in Spanish; however, it means much more. Retratos, as a method, was inspired by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1997, 2005, 2016) description of portraiture as a main inquiry method. Portraits are composites that are co-constructed to create a fuller representation. Similar to polaroid pictures and instant photography, retratos are condensed, compacted, and abbreviated versions of the composite or whole image being reflected. In short, retratos focus on a theme; a slice of a person’s whole life that connects to their larger story. As exemplified in the stories told through this paper, retratos center teacher’s lives and help connect their experiences to larger stories of education.

Author

• José Alfredo Menjivar Ortéz, Independent Scholar