The Place of Story in the Study of Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

ith increasing frequency over the past several years we, as members of a community of investigator-practitioners, have been telling stories about teaching and teacher education rather than simply reporting correlation coefficients or generating lists of findings. This trend has been upsetting to some who mourn the loss of quantitative precision and, they would argue, scientific rigor. For many of us, however, these stories capture, more than scores or mathematical formulae ever can, the richness and indeterminacy of our experiences as teachers and the complexity of our understandings of what teaching is and how others can be prepared to engage in this profession. It is not altogether surprising, then, that this attraction to stories has evolved into an explicit attempt to use the literatures on or to define both the method and the object of inquiry in teaching and teacher education. Story has become, in other words, more than simply a rhetorical device for expressing sentiments about teachers or candidates for the teaching profession. It is now, rather, a central focus for conducting research in the field. We are certainly not alone in giving formal attention to story. This term, like others from linguistics and literary theory (e.g., discourse, text, deconstruction), has caught on with considerable enthusiasm throughout the intellectual world and is beginning to appear in widely different contexts. In psychology, for example, Bruner (1985) speaks of a narrative mode of thoug…