Pedagogical Stories and the Ripples they Carry: How Storywork Can Deepen Educator Praxis Over Time

• In Event: Storywork as a Generative Model for Educator Attunement and Learning Toward Justice and Well-Being

Abstract

This paper studies the role of storywork in educator learning within a participatory design research project going into its ninth year. Hubspace is a six-week summer program serving Black, Latinx/e and Asian/South Asian middle school youth. The Hubspace team (all educators of color) includes community educators, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, artists and youth facilitators working together to design, implement, and study expansive STEAM and literacy learning. Our analysis examines innovations in our designs for educator learning through storywork, and the consequential ripples they opened up with regards to educators’ being and becoming.

Guiding theoretical concepts include: pedagogical mediation as a creative practice that offers a window on educators’ political-ethical becoming (Vossoughi, et. al. 2021), interpretive power and the role of careful attunement to student sensemaking within projects of educational justice (Rosebery et. al., 2016), and the repurposing of fieldnote writing towards expansive forms of storywork and educator learning (Archibald, 2008; Gutiérrez et. al., 2017). Situated within a long-term, co-developed ethnographic data set, this paper focuses on the following data sources and inquiries:

Audio recordings of training sessions that invited educators to work with data-rich stories developed in prior years emphasizing the poetics of pedagogical language, the power of moment-to-moment mediation, the differences between behavioral and sense-making stances towards young people (Warren & Rosebery, 2011), and pedagogical textures that substantiate healthful forms of political education.

Audio recordings of daily educator reflections that illuminate when and how educators drew on these stories to make sense of their interactions with students, the ways reflections were mediated, and how educators grew into new roles as teacher educators.

Educator field notes as a space to think through key moments from the day prior to collective reflection. Field notes make visible the specific ways educators crafted stories of their interactions in dialogue with pedagogical stories from training.

Audio-video recordings of program data allow us to triangulate educator reflections with the interactions themselves, supporting multi-dimensional views of educator praxis.

Our findings illustrate how stories can beget new stories through the ways they mediate educator attunement, decision-making, and living in real-time interaction with students. Evidence includes key vignettes situated within long-term arcs of educator reflection through which prior stories became artifacts for thinking used to explain new ways of relating with students, and with their own families and friends. We also trace the forms of mediation that cultivated such learning, such as how a younger Hubspace leader came to ask educators about pedagogical moves they witnessed that day, and interactions with students they would want to return to and revise. Finally, educator learning often involved recognizing powerful learning arcs among students in ways that cultivated new relationships with time and their own mediational grace and patience as educators.

We conclude with reflections on how expansive, proleptic views of student becoming interconnect with proleptic views of educator becoming, and how learning to be inquisitive and careful readers of pedagogical interaction (Warren et. al., 2020) can cultivate profound sensibilities towards learning, language, young people, and educational possibility.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Teyona James-Harris, Northwestern University

• Onam Lansana, Northwestern University

• Paula K. Hooper, Northwestern University