Table Of ContentNarratives on Teaching and
Teacher Education
Narratives on Teaching and
Teacher Education
An International Perspective
Edited by
Andrea M.A. Mattos
NARRATIVES ON TEACHING AND TEACHER EDUCATION
Copyright © Andrea M.A. Mattos, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61233-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-37715-2 ISBN 978-0-230-62291-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230622913
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Narratives on teaching and teacher education : an international
perspective / edited by Andrea M.A. Mattos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Teaching—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Teachers—Training of—
Cross-cultural studies. I. Mattos, Andrea M. A.
LB1025.3.N37 2009
371.102—dc22 2008051593
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: July 2009
To my husband,
the one person who has taught me to look
at life from a positive stand point
and to never give up.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix
Foreword: Inquiring into Narrative Matters xi
D. Jean Clandinin
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Andrea M.A. Mattos
1 Narrative Frameworks for Living, Learning,
Researching, and Teaching 11
Anne Laura Forsythe Moore
Part I Stories of Discovery and Transformation
2 Understanding Classroom Experiences:
Listening to Stories in order to Tell Stories 31
Andrea M.A. Mattos
3 B ecoming a Teacher: Using Narratives to Develop
a Professional Stance of Teaching Science 47
Robert W. Blake Jr. and Sarah Haines
4 Personal Politics and Identity in Student
Teachers’ Stories of Learning to Teach 65
Alan Ovens
5 L earning to Teach Across Cultural Boundaries 77
Neil Hooley and Maureen Ryan
viii ● Contents
6 R iver Journeys: Narrative Accounts of South Australian
Preservice Teachers during Professional Experience 91
Faye McCallum and Brenton Prosser
7 Exploring Ways of Promoting an Equality Discourse
Using Non-Text/Creative Approaches for Learning in
the Everyday Lives of Adult Literacy Learners 107
Rob Mark
8 Team Teaching: Having the Eyes to See the Wind 123
Dawn Garbett and Rena Heap
9 Enhancing Faculty Commitment, Hope, and
Renewal through Developmental Performance Review 137
Georgia Quartaro and Bob Cox
Part II Stories of Hope
10 “ It Gives Me a Kind of Grounding”: Two University
Educators’ Narratives of Hope in Worklife 151
Denise J. Larsen
11 Finding the Time and Space to Write:
Some Stories from Canadian Teacher Educators 167
Dianne M. Miller
12 Learning about Hope through Hope:
Reflections on the ESL Enterprise 177
Judy Sillito
13 A Newcomer’s Hope: A Narrative Inquiry into One Teacher
Educator’s Professional Development Experiences in Canada 191
Yi Li
14 A Tail of Hope: Preservice Teachers’ Stories of
Expectation Toward the Profession 203
Andrea M.A. Mattos
Notes on Contributors 217
Index 221
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1 T he Hingley Homestead, Caribou, Pictou County,
Nova Scotia, Canada 18
2.1 Elements that Influence the FL Classroom 42
6.1 Example River Journey 98
Tables
2.1 Subcategories for the Participant’s Dominant Stories 37
3.1 Source of Written Narratives 51
3.2 Comparing Enduring Beliefs 56
3.3 Jennifer’s Qualities of a “Good” Teacher 60
FOREWORD
Inquiring into Narrative Matters
D. Jean Clandinin
T
he chapters in this lovely edited collection call me to consider the
importance of the multiplicity of ways of engaging in narrative inquiry.
Working from the following understandings of narrative inquiry, I see
the range of ways the authors whose work is represented in this collection
have taken up their inquiries. All authors appear to work from “a view of
human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied
lives” (Connelly and Clandinin 2006, p. 7). Narrative inquiry is a way of
understanding and inquiring into experience through “collaboration between
researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in
social interaction with milieus” (Clandinin and Connelly 2000, p. 20).
Three commonplaces of narrative inquiry, temporality, sociality, and
place, specify dimensions of an inquiry and serve as a conceptual framework
for narrative inquiry. In our understanding (Connelly and Clandinin 2006)
of these three commonplaces, they are places or dimensions that need to be
simultaneously explored in undertaking a narrative inquiry. Inquiring into
experience through attending to all three commonplaces simultaneously
is, in part, what distinguishes narrative inquiry from other methodologies.
Through attending to the commonplaces, narrative inquirers are able to
study the complexity of the relational composition of people’s lived experi-
ences both inside and outside of an inquiry and, as well, to imagine the
future possibilities of these lives.
The editor of this collection, Andrea Mattos, has thoughtfully organized
the book into two sections: stories of discovery and transformation and sto-
ries of hope. What strikes me about this organization revolves around how
xii ● Foreword
temporality is foregrounded in the study of experience as she positioned
these chapters in relation with one another within the book.
Temporality is a key dimension of understanding experience narratively
and is, as noted above, central to any narrative inquiry. As one inquires into
the lived and told stories of teachers and teacher educators, temporality, that
is, the past, present, and future, is a dimension that needs to be always vis-
ible in the inquiry. As I noted above, however, inquiry also needs to attend
simultaneously to the commonplaces of sociality and place. All of the chap-
ter authors work with close attention to the simultaneous exploration of the
three commonplaces. However, temporality becomes foregrounded by the
way Mattos organizes the book. She foregrounds temporality by drawing
attention to hope as a narrative composition and, in so doing, gives a sense of
an intentional trajectory of storied plot lines. By focusing on hope in the sec-
ond part of the book, Mattos makes explicit the focus on the future within
the temporal dimension of narrative inquiry.
In Part I, we see the power and importance of engaging teachers and
teacher educators in inquiring into their past and present stories. In some
chapters we see researchers engaged in analysis of student teachers’ and
teachers’ narratives of experience. In other chapters we see researchers engag-
ing in more autobiographical narrative inquiries as they inquire into their
own narratives of experience as teacher educators. The chapters in Part I are
rich in acknowledging the sociality dimension with its dialectic between the
personal and the social. Similarly the chapters attend to the cultural, insti-
tutional, and linguistic narratives that shape the landscapes on which the
individual teachers, teacher educators, and researchers live.
What marks the second part of the collection is a different attention to
temporality, a temporality that attends to a future-oriented trajectory of hope.
In this part of the book, the chapters also attend to the dimension of social-
ity with its dialectic between the personal and social shaped by institutional,
cultural, social, and linguistic narratives. The chapters here, however, while
grounded in stories of the past and present experiences of teachers, teacher
educators, participants, and researchers, make more explicit the future tem-
poral dimensions of narrative inquiries. Understanding hope narratively
allows these researchers to point out possible future plotlines, as Mattos notes
“a sense of new possibilities and expectations that enhance their empower-
ment,” which point toward, as Maxine Greene (2008) suggests, “what I am
not yet.” There is a sense of becoming; becoming that follows an upward
trajectory. The chapters, too, help us see hopelessness, a trajectory that points
downward into the future with a sense of loss, of not becoming.
Mattos thoughtfully adds to the richness of the chapters by her concep-
tual organization. The chapters in and of themselves also offer readers much
