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Careful attention to experience is often the starting point for narrative inquiries into teaching and learning. This chapter uses autobiographical reflection on pedagogical experiences, young peoples’ drawings, and examples of narrative research to demonstrate the value of sharing and connecting personal stories. In the context of evidence-based reforms in education and a focus on accountability and teaching standards, Australian governments, like others, express concern about the “quality” of teacher education and are looking to models of school-based “training.” While apprenticeship models of teacher education are considered inadequate, stronger partnerships between schools and universities are desirable. I argue that rather than continuing to be at the periphery, narrative research and pedagogies can exist as a central thread in teacher education programs, which have stronger connections to schools, teachers, and young people because they reveal the complexity of teaching and learning processes, enable deeper levels of understanding, and foster a critical reflective stance. I use examples from practice to show how narrative pedagogies contextualize, problematize, and clarify personal values and experience, theory, policy, and issues of practice. Nowhere is this more powerful than in situations where dispersed narratives, told orally, in writing and through visual representations sit alongside of one another and collide. Dispersed narratives challenge the view that narratives are contained and individualized. Rather than being discrete, they exist as intertextual connections or networks of meaning that can be created by groups of people not necessarily confined by space and time. This chapter aims to open a space for the continued thinking about how dispersed narratives can be used in teacher education to deepen professional learning.

Interest in narrative pedagogies is growing. However, few studies have been conducted outside Western contexts. There remains a paucity of narrative research published by Japanese scholars, despite a pervasive culture of “teacher to teacher conversations,” storytelling, reflection, and action research by teachers in Japan. Thus, this research fills an important gap in the literature. It provides exemplars from preservice teacher education, higher education, and high school, as these educational milieus reflect the notion of “traveling stories” (Olson & Craig, 2009). We describe how this narrative pedagogy is interpreted from an insider’s point of view, through the voices of teacher education students, teachers, and teacher educators. In this process, students and teachers become curriculum-makers (Clandinin & Connelly, 1988; Craig & Ross, 2008), co-constructing knowledge, and reshaping teacher knowledge and identity. Narrative teacher education pedagogies resonate with Japanese teachers and play an important role in curriculum, teaching, and learning in Japan within our increasingly interconnected world. Furthermore, narrative relates favorably to many Japanese cultural practices, including kankei (interrelationships), kizuna (bonds), and kizuki (with-it-ness). These are important, integral, and tacit elements of Japanese teachers’ practices because they embody the “mind and heart” of their personal practical sense of knowing. Furthermore, these practices involve placing other people’s needs ahead of our own – an essential skill for global citizens of the 21st century.

The aim of this chapter is to feature exemplars of narrative pedagogies used in teacher education in Finland. The theoretical framework of the chapter is based on two commitments. First, we argue that narrative pedagogies are meaningful, since becoming and being a teacher is a constantly changing and developing identity story. Narrative pedagogies also link to the notion of “participant knowledge,” in contrast to “spectator knowledge,” which has been the dominant view on epistemology in the modern scientific world. Participant knowledge is something typically narrative in nature, which has much to do with emotional and expressive ways of understanding the world around us. In this chapter, we first introduce practices of autobiographical writing as examples how to promote skills of critical reflection. We then introduce narrative pedagogies, which have been organized for peer groups. During the first project, a special method, KerToi, was developed both for preservice and in-service teacher education. The newest model is the Peer-Group Mentoring (PGM) model, in which peer group practices were further developed to support early career teachers in Finland, and to be used as the European Paedeia Café model. We conclude that narrative pedagogies in Finnish teacher education offer an excellent environment that links theoretical, spectator knowledge to participant knowledge. The narrative approach to peer-group mentoring can be seen as a promising pedagogy, which can promote a more humane teacher education experience and reinforce the professional and personal growth of future teachers.

In the past two decades, there has been an increase in the use of narrative in research and teacher education. Telling, writing, and interrogating personal stories can lead preservice and in-service teachers to better understandings of their contexts, and, in turn, lead them to further negotiate their teaching beliefs and develop their pedagogical approaches. This chapter outlines a narrative approach in teacher education in Singapore. A brief description is given of how a teacher education course was revamped to include and embed a narrative way of knowing in its weekly tutorials and in one of its assignments. Extracts from the students’ narratives and their responses are used to illustrate how the students explored and expanded their understandings of themselves as teachers.

This chapter explores literacy narratives as a narrative inquiry approach used in a Canadian education foundation course which focuses on story and experience as told and retold through letter-writing correspondence among teacher candidates. The process is illustrated in the chapter through a literacy narrative exemplar. The 3R framework developed by the author in her research program on poverty and education was applied to teacher candidates’ narrative ways of excavating storied experiences and assumptions in schooling. The 3R framework helps teacher candidates deconstruct their literacy narrative correspondences in order to avoid ‘hardening’ into their lived storied experiences as they work through the framework of: narrative reveal to help them excavate unconscious assumptions that surface in their writing; narrative revelation to show how they can interrogate further their own (sometimes biased) experiences, and; narrative reformation to show how prospective teachers can begin to transform teacher knowledge through awakened new narratives. Literacy narratives, as a curriculum making pedagogy to deconstruct formally and informally using personal educative experiences, readings from the course, and usage of the 3R framework, is a pedagogical example of social justice that gives dignity, respect, and perspective in order to reframe thinking about diverse issues in teaching and teacher education.

This chapter addresses a sensitive topic in the field of education: the relationship between and among narrative inquiry, critical analysis, and critical theory. It argues that narrative inquirers are critical – but not in the same way that critical theorists are critical, although they may draw on the same literature and terms. To make our point, we unpack three of our peer-reviewed articles and highlight our theoretical frames and research moves to demonstrate criticality in narrative inquiry. We specifically discuss (1) titles and topics, (2) research frameworks, (3) historical and contemporary data, (4) use of participants' voices (words and feelings), (5) themes, and (6) new knowledge. We mostly argue that narrative inquiry exists because of experience. From experience, everything else unfolds – including criticality – depending on where the researcher in relationship with research participants, takes the inquiry. This chapter explicitly addresses a lived issue known both inside the narrative inquiry community and outside of it.

Narrative-biographical perspectives have taken on a very prominent role in both the research on and practices of teacher education (both preservice and in-service) over the past decades. This chapter briefly situates and explains this “narrative turn,” and continues with the presentation and discussion of concrete pedagogical applications of narrative-biographical approaches. A storied example of one approach is followed by a general discussion of its educational rationale and the necessary conditions for its use. References are made to narrative language as a genre, its contextualized nature as well as the connection with (student) teachers’ developing sense of self.

In this chapter, we inquire into our ever-unfolding experiences as teachers and with teacher research participants in order to explore the complexities of curriculum making in teacher education. In doing so, we lay the foundation for understanding narrative inquiry as both theory and method as such, frame our work in this volume. Curriculum making, a term introduced by Joseph Schwab, reflects the dynamic process of learning in which the teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu interact. Moreover, we think about the ways people make sense of themselves, identity-making, in the process of curriculum making. Through Derek’s experiences with Lee, a previous Grade five student, and Cindy’s work with Jesse, a research participant, we inquire into their curriculum making and identity-making. We argue that in schools, there are multiple curricula in the making, going beyond the formal notions of curriculum as grade-level standards or classroom objectives. In our inquiry process, we consider experiences in schools through Aoki’s understanding of curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum. In his writing, Aoki noted that the lived experience of curriculum in schools is much more complex and varied than the planned curriculum that is meant for a generalized audience; students and teachers bring their lives with them into particular contexts that indelibly shape the ways that curriculum is lived out. As well, we think about the ways experiences and places shape teachers and researchers and the ways we see the world.

This paper presents the results of empirical research on the effects of teaching practice on student teachers’ teaching competence and psycho-emotional development using the “most significant change” narrative investigative technique.

Following a qualitative research approach, the study was conducted during the academic year 2021–2022 in two phases (January and May) with the participation of 73 student teachers of the Department of Theology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) during their mentored teaching practice. Student teachers’ narratives were collected and analysed using the most significant change technique (Davies and Dart, 2005). Content analysis was conducted with the contribution of seven independent judges.

The results indicate that the Teaching Practice course with the guidance of mentors has a direct and positive effect on student teachers’ teaching competence. Mentors also seem to have a positive effect on student teachers’ psycho-emotional development. The research also confirms the reliability of the most significant change narrative technique for investigating the effect of related educational interventions.

The study empirically validates the usefulness and potential of the investigative narrative most significant change technique for evaluating the effects of teaching practice on student teachers’ professional development with the guidance of experienced mentor teachers. The results of the study also have implications for the design and evaluation of teacher practice programmes.

A great deal of contemporary research in education, and in the social sciences more generally, is conducted through interviews. Interview-derived accounts and narratives have been used as data for many decades. We argue that, despite their popularity and their long history, such data are not always subjected to rigorous analysis. Researchers too often treat interviews as sources of insight about informants’ experiences and feelings, but pay insufficient attention to the forms and functions of such accounts. We argue that they need to be approached through the analytic lens of accounting devices and narrative structures. We exemplify this approach through ‘academic’ narratives: scientists’ discovery accounts and accounts of doctoral supervision. We emphasise how such accounts need to be examined in terms of the discursive construction of reality. Such an approach is an important corrective to the selective reporting of ‘atrocity stories’ about postgraduate education.