Stories#
From Michelle's Module 1 for EDM5000
A teacher’s core knowledge comes from their practice, from the actions they have taken in classrooms. Teachers utilise stories to explain to others what happened and why, but also to find a way to understand for themselves ‘… a bridge between personal understandings and the world of classrooms and educational knowledge’ (Carter, 1995, p.326). Teacher stories are ‘… a way of grasping the richness and indeterminacy of our experiences as teachers and the complexity of our understandings of what teaching is’ (Carter, 1995, p.326). ‘Stories convey the multiplicity of ways actions and situations intertwine and thus accurately represent the complex demands of teaching’ (Carter, 1993, p.10). ‘Stories have the power to direct and change our lives’ (Noddings, 1991, p.157). We are a storytelling species using narrative to understand and share our experiences and information Stories have been used across time to communicate the essential values of a culture, to validate our own experiences and strengthen community bonds. They connect us to our past, present and future and may even shape how we experience the world (Bruner, 2002). ‘Through narrative, we construct, reconstruct, in some ways reinvent yesterday and tomorrow. Memory and imagination fuse in the process’ (Bruner, 2002, p.93). It is the primary way we make our experiences meaningful to ourselves and others, a way how we know ourselves and are known by others.