Abstract
In this chapter, three transdisciplinary faculty from a College of Education worked together as Teaching Fellows to support their colleagues’ social justice teaching efforts during a university-wide pivot to remote instruction. The authors nuance the dimensions of storytelling for use in the classroom to illustrate ways in which other educators might take up anti-racist practices that humanize what it means to be an educator in these trying times. We found that a pedagogy grounded in story modeled vulnerability, attended to students’ wellness, and opened up conversations around difficult topics such as racial inequities. Here, we deepen our commitment to the use of storytelling as a powerful pedagogical practice that models leaning into courageous conversations and delves into the urgent issues facing educators and students; that is, how we engage our students in humanizing and meaningful conversations around race-related topics. To that end, we use our year-long work as critical friends to nuance and advance storytelling as a pedagogy of teacher education by identifying three functions of storytelling: (1) modeling vulnerability; (2) attending to students’ wellness; and (3) opening up conversations on difficult topics. The forms of storytelling we pedagogically drew on can be categorized in one of two ways: stories we told about ourselves and stories we told about others. Specific examples of ways we shared stories about ourselves were the sharing of personal experiences and in letters written to students. Stories we told about others’ experiences were shared through specific children’s literature and memoir.
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Morettini, B., Abraham, S., Wilson-Hill, Z. (2022). The Stories We Teach By: The Use of Storytelling to Support Anti-racist Pedagogy. In: Browne, S., Jean-Marie, G. (eds) Reconceptualizing Social Justice in Teacher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16644-0_7
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