Mentoring Research Stories: Teachers’ Stories

Abstract

This chapter relates eight teachers’ stories, giving their personal understandings and opinions about how feelings (including those about the education system) affected their own learning and teaching at the time. In this type of collaborative mentoring research , the researcher’s role is that of a catalyst in supporting the participant to surface their own relevant data . The data which was collected sometimes involved art work and symbolic modelling by mentees. The stories related learning difficulties due to conditions imposed by institutions and school management and sometimes expressed anger about injustices. Some of them tell the story of the teachers’ own historical reasons for teaching and for quitting. The author tells her own story as a researcher.