How to Elevate the Voices of Teachers. Try Narrative Pedagogy

How to Elevate the Voices of Teachers. Try Narrative Pedagogy

Rebecca Thomas has worked passionately in education for the past 25 years in
primary to intermediate settings and in a variety of leadership roles in New
Zealand. Steve Saville is a passionate educator who has significant experience
across a range of educational settings. For the last three years, he has been
working as an educational consultant specializing in the area of sustainable
school change and leadership in New Zealand.

In our haste to transfer academic research and government policies into
fruition, the professional development of teachers has been a casualty in this
compliance narrative. Typically, the teacher/leader becomes the conduit, a
channel for conveying knowledge from the source to the students. Within this
transmissive system, we neglect to empower our teachers.

Just as we crave the desire to enable our students to be agentic, active
learners, driven by the joy of learning, we should also hold our professional
developers to account for creating teachers who persevere, are resilient to
challenges, who aren’t afraid to question, innovate, create, and learn from
their mistakes.

Narrative pedagogy is an approach to thinking about teaching and learning that
evolves from the lived experiences of teachers and students, using a narrative
landscape to find and explore meaning. The telling of stories opens the door
for eliciting and analyzing issues, interpreting and contextualizing meaning,
and reflecting and integrating personal and theoretical knowledge. The most
important thing about narratives is that they have an emotional effect on
people: They can both shock and encourage them.

“Stories are easier to remember because stories are how we remember. When
facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes
less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts
into context and deliver them with emotional impact.”

We have always found meaning in our lives through stories. It is what makes us
human. Our ability to use metaphor and story to create history, culture, and
purpose are all unique to us as a species. Think of when you listened to a
song, read a poem, or watched a movie that has touched you on a personal
level. It was written in another place and another time by a stranger who does
not know you and whose life may bear only a scant connection to your own, but
it resonated, it made you think, laugh, cry, filled you with love, or energy,
or sadness. This is the power of narrative. Stories define and validate us as
individuals and as a society.

To do this requires courage. A courage of care is needed to respect and
empower the voices of our own people to ensure we are not only meeting our
community’s needs, we are also ensuring our schools are places of joy and
magic. Listening is the first step toward empowerment and agency.

Working hard with a collective of schools that were trying to collaborate on
raising the literacy achievement of their students, we found the above
approach needed implementing. This was a mixed group of schools with varying
contexts, from primary to intermediate to high school brought together because
of their data, their statistics.

Initially, there was conflict in these sessions as the school staffs didn’t
quite understand the purpose of discussing the progress of students who were
at levels above and below their “usual” scope and away from their context.
They were also struggling to see the point in yet another meeting to their
busy week. Taking the time to listen to their concerns, giving them space to
share their narrative, and hearing what they were finding challenging, we
designed the following meeting with care.

As they trundled into the next meeting tired and resistant, the session opened
with a rallying call, a “thank you” for their honesty with a reassurance that
their words had been heard. Instead of talking about progress, the educators
spent time discussing what teaching methods they currently used in their
settings. If there were any strategies that were unfamiliar in the group,
teachers volunteered to model what that looked like to the others. Each school
was represented, each teacher was nervous.

On sharing their teaching strategies, the room erupted in joy. They had been
empowered to share their stories, shared their expertise. Our job had been to
merely listen, respond, and facilitate the conversation. After each modeled
example, they excitedly referred what they had seen to the progression
framework we had been building a rubric for, then they made connections with
how the modeled example could be adapted for the level they taught at. The
result was efficacy as they had room to create their own narrative instead of
being compliant. The rabble had bonded.

There is a danger in using narrative pedagogy. To share our stories, to create
our own narrative, to establish where we are and where we need to go means
being emotionally vulnerable, it means sharing and collaborating. This is
going to be, at times, uncomfortable and challenging. Sometimes, it is easier
not to and just go with the flow.

The dramatist Bertolt Brecht realized this when he used Verfremdungseffekt,
(the “estrangement effect” or the “alienation effect”) when he wanted his
audience to respond to important themes (wars) that were confronting Germany
between the two world wars. Brecht set his plays in “removed locations” to
enable his audience to respond to the themes and issues before personalizing
them to facilitate a more rational thought process and emotional connection.

This step is important if we want to use narrative pedagogy to not only
resonate and validate but to develop a shared understanding and collaborative
action.

At its core, the use of narrative pedagogy allows for voices to be shared to
develop a collective story or history that defines and drives the group. It
values the individual by giving them space to share and be heard, so we get to
know ourselves better individually and collectively. The process of “storying”
in this way is one reason why reflection journals are often so effective.

We invite our teachers to reflect on the way they teach, favoring
relationships and student agency as researched ways to effect change in how
our students learn. If this magic method works from teacher to students, it’s
about time we realize that this method will also help our teachers learn, too.

This approach is not new. It is well researched and documented. For example,
the work of Rasa Nedzinskaitė-Mačiūnienė [Vytautas Magnus University] and Agnė
Juškevičienė [Vilnius University], Lithuania, Kerry Priest [Kansas State
University] and Corey Seemiller [Wright State University], as well as Ivor
Goodson [University of Tallinn] and Scherto Gill [University of Sussex], all
detail the power of stories and narrative pedagogical approaches.