Using data from 22 students in a year-long teacher certification program, the authors explore the analysis of personal teaching metaphors as a means of facilitating the professional development of beginning teachers. Strengths and weaknesses of the approach are identified, and implications for teacher education are discussed. (SLD)

Investigated whether low-income mothers learned to interact with their preschoolers in ways that fostered narrative skills. Mothers of intervention children were encouraged to elicit questions, encourage longer narratives, and participate in narrative conversation. Assessment of children's pre- and post-intervention narrative and vocabulary skills…

Examined personal storytelling of European-American preschoolers from working- or middle-class families as a medium through which they construct autonomous selves. Found that children in both communities had extensive rights to speak of past experiences and limited rights to author experiences. Middle-class communities viewed expressing one's view…

In the world of work and in the social lives of many, new technology plays an important role in establishing and maintaining relationships and exchanging information. The school system varies in its response to this new technology and particularly to the popular communication of email and mobile phone users. In schools and classrooms, policies,…

The article reports on findings from a replication of a study of bilingual children's editing and correction strategies. The earlier study analyzed revisions that 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders made to their own compositions, written in Spanish. The present study applied the same procedure and assessment rubric to the first draft of compositions…

Men who choose to do "women's work" and enter the female culture of the primary school can often initially face a range of stereotyped responses to their choice. Drawing on stories from a small sample of trainee and serving male teachers, we adopt the term "identity bruising" to describe the "knock backs" that occur…

In this ethnographic study, I contrast the educational experiences of two Central American immigrant women in an English as a second language (ESL) family literacy program in the San Francisco Bay area in 2002. Based on life-history interviews and classroom observations, I argue that these learners' second language and literacy development can…

This article, based on a larger, autoethnographic qualitative research project, focuses on the first-hand experiences of 27 faculty of color teaching in predominantly White colleges and universities. The 27 faculty represented a variety of institutions, disciplines, academic titles, and ranks. They identified themselves as African American,…

A study investigated the impact of popular culture on young children's conception of gender, as revealed through the stories they write and tell. The research was conducted at Grosse Ile High School on the remote Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Quebec, Canada, from 1991-1994 with 46 students ages 6-7 years old. The concept of the…

"Scaffolding" refers to the temporary support that parents and others give a child to perform a task. In narrative contexts, children's speech is guided and scaffolded by mothers who initiate and elicit children's contributions about past experiences. Unfortunately, data on this phenomenon from languages other than English are very…

This study investigated the influences of prior life and employment history on the thinking and practice of beginning, second-career elementary and secondary school teachers. Data were drawn from classroom observations, journal writing, and open-ended informal interviews; case studies were then developed illustrating the impact of personal and…

This study was conducted in order to examine programmatic and personal dimensions that interact to shape a future teacher's beliefs and practices. The study charted stages of preservice teacher development through dialogue journal case study analysis of eight students representing divergent academic disciplines and cultural biographies. The…

This paper describes in detail the narrative approach taken in a study of a particular facet of learning in the workplace--how people make sense of change. In unstructured in-depth interviews, employees were encouraged to tell their stories about their organisations, revealing details about the organisational culture and the ways in which this…

The investigators in this continuing study at Towson State University, Maryland, followed up the experiences of preservice elementary teachers, as revealed by their journals and interviews, with an interview schedule for their college supervisors. Recurring patterns in the areas of: (1) view of work; (2) attitude; (3) personal relations; (4)…

This paper examines the social phenomenon of leadership succession in a school from the perspective of the successor, based on the author's own experience in succeeding to the principalship of a junior high school. Using a combination of participant observation, informal interview, and existing and collected documents, the study was designed to…