Storying as Methodology: A Teacher's Creative Escape From the Machine

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogies for Pandemic Times: Reflections on Collaboration, Curriculum, and Communities of Practice

Abstract

In this paper, we engage storying as methodology (Author, forthcoming 2022) to explore how the teacher-author of this piece evolved her identities as an educator at a no-excuse urban charter school (NEUCS), mother, and activist by narrating her curricular resistance and curricular creation. Storying methodology awakens and reinvigorates identities that had been mechanized -- or systemically muted into operational obedience -- through narrative, and explores how these identities develop to subvert master narratives that harm teachers and minoritized students, and imagine new systems for teaching and learning. Together, we rediscovered the teacher-author’s multiple, intersecting identities, while imagining herself occupying new roles of resistance. We propose that storying as methodology can help teachers in spaces like NEUCS cultivate reflexivity and resist mechanizing systems.

Authors

• Bianca Licata, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Allison Paludi