New research on teaching involves qualitative, or ethnographic, methods. It is highly descriptive and often relies on narrative inquiry, which is embedded with messages about power, justice, and inequality. The new research relies on language and dialogue, using metaphors, stories, biographies, autobiographies, conversations, exemplars,…

Describes the Community-Based Arts Project in central New York State, which offers a course through Cornell University that allows students to explore local history and family traditions through storytelling. The steps of story collecting and sharing are a circular transaction of reflecting, listening, telling, and reflecting with the audience,…

Personal event and fictional narratives are compared across 36 normal children in 2 language-ability (one high, one low) groups using episodic analysis. Findings suggest that narrative structures for personal event narratives and fictional stories may follow different developmental paths, and that differences in productive language abilities…

A resource room teacher of elementary students with mild disabilities and behavior disorders describes student successes in running the school store, telling Appalachian folk tales to primary classes, and carrying out other Foxfire-inspired projects. Student comments are included. (SV)

Presents a case study of one child's narratives and of the teacher's efforts to change sharing time in a first grade classroom. Demonstrates the social nature of the classroom language community and provides an understanding of how children and teachers can work together to understand and support each other's stories. (PRA)

School-aged, hearing-impaired children's propensity for incorporating complex syntax into the narratives and conversations they produced was investigated. Language samples containing both conversations and narratives in the form of story retellings were collected from seven subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing losses. (48 references) (VWL)

The pedagogical power of narrative has been much underestimated. Master cases using narrative or electronic narrative significantly enhance learning. The modern "bite"-oriented casebook does not make effective use of narrative materials or meet neurological needs. A useful approach might combine master cases, electronic narrative, high-quality…

Describes a rationale and method for crafting and analyzing personal/professional stories of leadership and administrative practice, based on doctoral students' interviews with experienced school administrators and educational leaders. Stories illustrate explicit rules used by administrators to manage problems and the more tacit assumptions…

Explains the evolution of the parallel stories methodology of contextualizing teacher knowledge, including substantive, theoretical, and conceptual understandings that arise from the inquiry and the implications the approach holds for teacher education programs. The paper also presents excerpts from a current publication to illustrate the…

Examines the role of work in teachers' stories in an Israeli religious school with 76 teachers, 56 of whom are women. Teachers' stories present the conflict between the modern consumer society, with the modern woman's role, and the traditional religious community and the roles of wife and mother. Stories also present teachers' solutions to the…

Describes and analyzes how context acts as a resource for and a constraint upon the personal experience narratives of educators. Examines a teacher's story told in a support group for democratic educators. Illustrates the role that context has on storytelling, how teacher-narrators interpret/act upon context, and how context constrains a story.…

Personally important autobiographical memories are the smallest unit of the life story, which begins to emerge in adolescence. This study examined 2 features of self-defining memories in late adolescence, the meaning made of the memories to garner an understanding of the narrative construction of identity as a life story and how those memories…

This thesis explores how a group of senior educators in Samoa undertook their educational journeys. It also traces my cultural and research learning journeys and the pathways I followed as a "palagi" (white person) undertaking cross-cultural research. A holistic and collaborative approach entailed consultation with the community…

Ohler describes the practice of making a digital story, which he defines as a brief narrative usually told in first person, combining writing with digital images and sound, and presented as a short movie. The art of digital storytelling, he asserts, enhances the teaching power of storytelling by teaching students valuable technical skills,…

Pondering the purposes of family stories and transcribed dialogues between family members raises an insight or two concerning the attainment of literacy. For instance, an exchange between two elder members of a family, one a former school teacher, the other a Ph.D., illustrates the spirited nature of arguments in the family. The school teacher…