Search results for: Storytelling

The capstone project discussed in this article is a multimedia digital storytelling project using iMovie, produced by first-year teachers simultaneously earning their master’s degree. Teachers created their own capstones representing their personal experience, professional development, and overall process toward becoming an empowered educator, while teaching students in urban schools. Utilizing a constant comparative content analysis, the authors determined whether and how teachers defined and represented empowerment in their capstones. Implications for the affordances of a multimedia capstone experience are discussed.

In this article, the authors were interested to examine the teaching experiences that lead beginning teachers to become early career leavers. The authors found that the participants learned to tell acceptable stories about why they decided to leave teaching profession. For example, one participant argued that she left teaching career because she wanted to become a mother or because she was accepted to graduate school. However, the authors argue that these answers are also cover stories that silence the struggles she experienced at school. Her silence about the harder to tell more complex stories could have disrupted the professional knowledge landscape of schools.

Utilizing the story as a research tool enables the individual to make unique voice heard and provides information regarding identity. In the education system, we study stories and place the emphasis on beginning teachers. During recent years, hundreds of stories have been collected from teachers in their first year of teaching. The stories were collected by means of a 'call' addressed to those individuals specializing in teaching to participate in a 'story contest'. As a result of the contest, we have collected thousands of stories, all of which enable us to examine the professional reality of beginning teachers in their first year of work. Two processes emerged: (1) the written stories describe and reflect the event that occurred in reality, and (2) the stories construct and shape reality. The processes of reflecting, constructing, and shaping are expressed on two levels: the individual level and the systemic-organizational level.

This article will describe two of the author's personal stories to try to explore the secret or opaque space between the original telling and retelling of stories in narrative inquiry. Based upon her difficult struggles with the two stories of tea, school, and narrative, the author suggests that narrative inquiry has to be a complex loop of relationship, reflexivity, responsibility, and recursion.