Generating Reflections Through Professional Collaborative Storytelling

Abstract

For teachers, storytelling is a way of making sense of everyday pedagogical practices and connecting with colleagues. In this paper, we explore how storytelling contributed to a collaborative culture indicative of our professional journey as four teacher educators. We examine six online weekly Zoom conversations we participated in as a teaching group to share our pedagogical ideas for enhancing an English education unit of work. During this storytelling, we discussed how we engaged with the teaching of, teaching about and teaching through the teaching and learning curriculum cycle to a first-year cohort of preservice teachers (PSTs). Importantly, we deliberated on how we could make our pedagogical decision-making visible to PSTs, illustrating the importance of teacher collaborative storytelling. We contend that by creating time and an online space for us as teacher educators to share, consider, evaluate and think collectively about pedagogical practices we not only developed a better understanding of our subject area but provided a collaborative professional learning model to our PSTs. We hope that other English teachers may read a little of their own professional journeys in our storytelling and be encouraged to engage with a professional collaborative dialogic space. This paper does not purport to suggest that this is the only way to teach English education to PSTs. Rather, it is about making visible who we are as learners and our practice as teacher educators and storytellers.