Narrative and the exploration of culture in teachers’ discussions of literacy, identity, self, and other

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of teacher narratives in relation to culture, literacy, self, and other within a masters literacy course in a US context. Within the course, teachers read and responded to autobiographical fiction and nonfiction in book club discussions and by sharing spoken and written personal narratives. Whereas many previous studies of teacher narrative have focused primarily on the content of teacher narrative, this study sought to consider the forms, functions, content, and contexts surrounding the sharing of personal narratives. Two cases, explored through sociolinguistic analysis, are presented to demonstrate how course participants constructed narratives and how these narratives functioned within the course and in relation to participant learning.     

Positioning within a cultural context: using Ricoeur’s preunderstandings as a heuristic for narrative data analysis in exploring identity,structure, and agency

I argue that Ricoeur’s preunderstandings can be used as a heuristic to aid researchers who collect narratives as data (1) to identify cultural meanings that become resources for participants’ positioning work, (2) to ground the identified cultural meanings in participants’ experiences, and (3) to understand participants’ interpretations of constraint and agency within that context. I outline how the philosophical hermeneutics of Ricoeur is consistent with a sociocultural perspective on positioning and identity, as well as present data analysis questions developed from Ricoeur’s ideas of narrative configuration to explore common cultural meanings used by participants in interpreting their lived experience. These questions provide a strategy to examine how participants may be referring to common cultural meanings but their individual interpretations of these meanings can have different implications for their feelings of agency.     

Etched Impressions: Student Writing as Engaged Pedagogy in the Graduate Sport Management Classroom

This article illustrates the pedagogical value of employing student narrative writing assignments in the graduate sport management classroom and advocates for cultural studies and critical pedagogy approaches to teaching sport management. The article considers students' autobiographical narratives within a theoretical framework of cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and critical sport studies in order to demonstrate how autobiographical writing exercises can provide students with an additional forum through which to express their individual voices and to link their personal experiences to course content as they prepare to enter a 21st century sport industry characterized by increasing diversity and globalization     

Limitations of language: developing arts‐based creative narrative in stories of teachers’ identities

This paper is based on a multidimensional study employing a heuristic methodology termed ‘creative narrative’ that combines arts‐based methods with narrative inquiry. Six female teachers’ narratives of identity are explored through artistic, visual images to illuminate if and how they story ‘unconscious’. The creative narratives, illuminated through a multi‐layered extract from one creative narrative, illustrate various ways in which the participants imputed meaning and power to tacit and non‐conscious influences which were emotionally potent but previously hidden from themselves and others and that continued to affect their professional identities. The paper argues that such unconscious or non‐conscious dimensions to teachers’ lives are crucial to the experience and exercise of professional identity and yet are largely absent from our understandings and outside the capture of narrative inquiry as it is presently conceptualized. Narrative inquiry should strive to extend its theoretical boundaries and incorporate non‐verbal arts‐based research methods in order to go beyond the limits of language and capture the meaning of lived experience in more holistic ways.     

Ongoing Doctoral Study Process to Live by: A Narrative Inquiry into the Doctoral Identity Construction Experiences—A Chinese Case

The study employs a narrative inquiry approach to probe a Chinese doctoral student’s identity construction experiences fraught with interruption and transformation. The longitudinal narratives gathered through participant entries in Evernote, a face-to-face life story interview, and researcher memos, have enabled a dynamic configuration of the intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions characterizing doctoral identity development. Using identity-trajectory as an analytical lens, the study highlights how individual agency is embodied and exercised in institutional, relational, and personal spaces where doctoral identity is formed and contested. Findings are episodically ordered as: beginning doctoral study with great expectations; conceptualizing the nature of becoming a doctoral student; forces that are disruptive to the development of the doctoral-researcher identity; the ongoing process of being mediated by socialization into an extended research community, socio- professional support, and agentic reflexivity over time. The study argues for using narrative inquiry to speak of and express the subtleties and continuities of doctoral students’ experiences. It also provides practical implications for action by supervisors and students in doctoral programs respectively.     

The competence to act: Chicana teacher role identity in life and career narratives

Relationships between teachers' biographical experiences and their beliefs and practices have become central concerns in the area of teacher life history and teacher socialization research. Unfortunately, few teachers from cultural minority backgrounds have been included in this research. In the present study, the life and career narratives of two Chicana teachers are examined in order to identify the influences of biographical experiences on how they define their teacher role identity. In recognition of and building from the narrative form of the written and interview data from which the life and career narratives are constructed, teacher role identity is defined as a narratively constructed self-image that presents an identity-in-action in which teachers' competence to act is demonstrated through their actions across various occupational challenges and demands. The competence to act is the product of teachers' biographical experiences and is based on the appropriation of family values through which the case study teachers make connections between their family socialization and their current professional educator role.     

An analysis of the use of autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning

The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global flows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, critical, detailed analysis of pedagogies for teachers’ own intercultural learning is largely absent in education research, in contrast to attention to developing students’ intercultural capabilities and theoretical and policy analyses. In beginning to address this limitation, this article offers a critical, reflexive analysis of our use and the efficacy of using autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning. Framing theories include interculturality, autobiographical narratives for teachers’ professional learning, reflexivity, and the effects of silence and silencing in relation to diversity and intercultural relations in schools. Three instances of teacher autobiographical narrative elicited as part of a large-scale, longitudinal study of intercultural education in Australian schools are deconstructed to elucidate their explicit and hidden meanings and effects. The analysis reveals that while autobiographical narrative has productive potential as a strategy for stimulating teacher reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations, it also contains hidden dangers and traps that caution against viewing it as a pedagogical cure-all in the development of teachers’ intercultural knowledge and skills.     

叙事心理学下自传体推理的研究述评

在叙事心理研究的视角下,对自传体推理的探讨存在两个维度:即自我-事件关联度与意义建构的精炼度。基于这两个维度的考察分析,学者们发现自传体推理的两个关键心理功能,即促进人格健康发展与增强幸福感。此外,自传体推理能力的发展是具有连续性的同时也有阶段性,并受到社会-文化因素的制约。     

A walk down memory lane: on the relationship between autobiographical memories and outdoor activities

This article highlights a theoretical and practical framework for integrating the neuropsychological concept of autobiographical memory with the experiential learning that takes place in the outdoors. Autobiographical memories, our recollections of specific, personal events, are constructed through a personal narrative process; the way we choose to tell the stories of our lives, to ourselves, and crucially to others. Our interdisciplinary framework suggests that the participant comes to value memories of particular past events because they come to be seen as part of a shared history with others. Elements of outdoor activities can aid in the formulation of personal narratives and the generation of autobiographical memories. Our case study of a person with congenital deafblindness shows that taking an outdoor education approach can aid in providing shared authentic memorable experiences and in facilitating the construction of autobiographical memories in the bodily tactile modality.     

郁达夫“自叙传”小说与日本私小说的叙述学解读

郁达夫“自叙传”小说借鉴了日本私小说“三位一体”的叙述方式,但同时,由于社会环境以及作家的创作心理和审美标准的影响,郁达夫在叙述人称与视角的使用以及文本中叙述时间的安排上,体现出不同于日本私小说作家的艺术追求,达到了一种特殊的美学效果。     

Student identity construction in online teacher education: a narrative life history approach

This paper explores student identity construction through the narrative life history of one non-traditional student, engaged in teacher education in a non-traditional way – a fully online university degree course. The students within this course are all mature-aged. Most are female, and have already developed personal identities as partners, friends and mothers, as well as professional identities such as teacher aides. Adding the new identity of “student” to these already established roles has an impact on these participants’ actions, beliefs, experiences and hence on their identities. Further, the notion that they are now “pre-service teachers” forces students to consider their professional identity in new and sometimes uncomfortable ways. This paper explores the challenges for one student created by the need to negotiate this complexity. Through this exploration using narrative life history methods, the paper considers the implications of the experience of becoming a student and a teacher.     

Ethical reflections on becoming teachers

This study analyzes narratives written in a culminating graduate seminar on reflective practice by 36 new secondary teachers who were asked to consider their moral beliefs, moral values and system of ethics as they reflected on their recent student teaching experiences. The findings explore how the participants depicted their constructed moral identities and felt obligated to critically reflect on them, affirmed values that guided their practice, and desired to be role models. Implications include attending to novice teachers’ moral identity development, infusing moral language into teacher education and recognizing teachers’ moral purposes, introducing curriculum to cultivate moral imagination, and helping teachers to realize their potential as moral agents by preparing them to become moral educators. The study also suggests the need to allow for broader ethical and political conceptions of the moral dimensions of teaching.     

Beginning teacher attrition: a question of identity making and identity shifting

While there is discrepancy about the actual percentage of early career teachers that leave teaching in their first five years, one consistent discovery in a number of countries is that attrition is high for early career teachers. I became curious about early career teacher attrition as I watched colleagues leave the profession that they thought was a lifelong calling. In order to inquire into this phenomenon, I moved through a three-stage research process. First, I engaged in writing a series of stories about my experiences as a beginning teacher. Using autobiographical narrative inquiry, I then inquired into the stories in order to retell them looking for resonances across the stories. Secondly, I conducted a review of the literature, analyzing the studies to identify how the problem of early career teacher attrition was conceptualized. I identified two dominant problem frames: a problem frame situated within the individual and a problem frame situated in the context. Lastly, I offered a different conceptualization of the phenomenon of early career teacher attrition that draws on my autobiographical narrative inquiry and the literature review. I frame the problem of teacher attrition, not as a personal or a contextual problem frame, but as a problem of teacher identity making and identity shifting.     

Writing and Dialogue In,and Around,a Senior Secondary Literature Classroom

The tradition of teachers engaging in narrative-based inquiry is now well established, as is its value for creating situated knowledge about teaching. This reflexive autobiographical article weaves together narrative accounts around a senior literature classroom environment. The article features two voices: a teacher (Natalie Bellis) and a Year 12 literature student (Jessica Garcia). Through this process of narrative inquiry, the teacher reflects on her experiences of exploring literary texts with senior students within a landscape of high-stakes assessment. In this way, the teacher engages with Dorothy Smith’s notion of ‘writing the social’, by using narrative to illuminate and critically inquire into the lived experience of teaching and learning. The motif, or thread, that binds these three narrative accounts is the act of letter-writing, which serves as a metaphor for the foregrounding of the personal within a context that is shaped by external forces that can result in conformity and generality. This tension between the ‘local actualities’ of experiences and the institutional structures that govern them is theorised using de Certeau’s metaphor of the city map.     

Bringing the jellyfish home: environmental consciousness and ‘sense of wonder’ in young children’s encounters with natural landscapes and places

The over-arching aim of this study was to elucidate and interpret topics that are relevant to how we understand children’s experiences and creation of meaning in natural landscapes and places within these landscapes. Following two nature-kindergarten groups regularly over ten months, the data for this ethnographic study consist of constructed narratives and narrative maps. Key topics relate to children’s multi-sensory experiences and the development of environmental consciousness, and their ‘sense of wonder’ as a driving force for exploration, interpretation and creation of meaning. Implications of the study for discourses of environmental education in the early years and local practices of taking children into nature are also discussed.     

Integration of addiction recovery and professional identities for counselor trainees

Counselor trainees in recovery from substance use often have a foundational recovery identity; they also develop a professional counselor identity through their training. This study utilized narrative inquiry to explore the integration of professional identity and recovery identity. Resonant threads and narrative tensions emerged from the storied experiences of participants.     

How a verbatim drama based on the lived experience of women casual academics in Australia resonated with its audience and transformed a narrative inquiry into an action research project

This article discusses how a performed drama based on a narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics in Australian universities is understood by an audience. The audience, principally comprised of casual and ongoing academics, described the drama as authentic and personally recognised many of the main scenarios and preoccupations re-presented. In particular, they identified that the drama’s re-presentation of casual academics’ feelings of insecurity, precarious collegial relationships, and a lack of belonging and voice strongly resonated with them. The presentation also provoked them to communicate their own lived experiences of academia, which constituted a second set of narrative data. Moreover, when the audience was invited to engage with and respond to performed data they became active and collaborative participants in the research project by sharing personal insights and narratives which extended the scope and depth of the initial research project. Therefore, a public re-presentation of narrative research can transform narrative inquiry research into an action research project if the researcher adjusts her/his research approach and accepts that the audience narrative response can function as a second phase of data gathering. Adjusting to the emergent generation of data in turn further democratises research processes and relationships.