Partnership Literacies: Storying Our Selves

Abstract

Sometimes I make my life a story, narrating trivial happenings around me in poetry. The man swaggered towards the produce section and clutched the spinach as if it were some golden treasure. Something like that. That's not really literary though. I had intentionally packed light today, but I still feel as if I'm being weighed down, as if were I not moving I would begin to sink into the ground, through the cracked concrete crossing. That's not really literary though.

Exploring practices of multiliteracies pedagogy through digital technologies: a narrative inquiry

“…To address this gap, recent studies have explored the potential of narrative inquiry for enhancing MLP. For example, Sjostrom and McCoyne (2017) use narrative inquiry to explore the role of digital technologies in shaping student literacy practices, while Magne et al (2019) employ narrative inquiry to examine the experiences of multilingual learners in a multiliteracies classroom. Our study similarly embraces the potential of narrative inquiry for advancing MLP and offer insights into how narrative inquiry can be used to promote equity and social justice in literacy teaching and learning, focusing on the practitioners' perspectives.…”

Expanding repertoires of resistance

“…Collaborative narrative inquiry between teachers and teacher educators (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017) can be a powerful method to cultivate critical pedagogies.…”

“…Narrative inquiry is also a tool used to help teachers cultivate professional identities (Alsup, 2005). For example, many English teacher educators assign literacy autobiographies (Smagorinsky and Whiting, 1995), and some engage in dialogic writing with teacher candidates (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017). Durden and Truscott (2013) document how preservice teachers moved towards culturally relevant ideologies as they engaged in critically reflexive narrative processes.…”

“…Our efforts showcase an example of educators in a US urban context, representing diverse background, teaching across grade levels and at different points in our careers, collaborating to cultivate critical ELA pedagogies. The process of narrative inquiry was powerful for us, as it has been for other educators (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017); it helped us to interrogate our own privilege (Garcia and O'Donnell-Allen, 2015), and to further develop our identities and practices as critical literacy teachers.…”

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Purpose This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or “the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971).

Design/methodology/approach Situated in a semester-long inquiry group, eight k-16 educators used narrative inquiry processes (Clandinin, 1992) to write and collectively analyze (Ezzy, 2002) stories describing personal experiences that brought them to critical ELA pedagogies. They engaged in three levels of analysis across the eight narratives, including open coding, thematic identification, and identification of how the narrative inquiry impacted their classroom practices.

Findings Across the narratives, the authors identify what aspects of the ELA reading, writing and languaging curriculum emerged as problematic; situate themselves in systems of oppression and privilege; and examine how processes of critical narrative inquiry contributed to their capacities to respond to these issues.

Research limitations/implications Collaborative narrative inquiry between teachers and teacher educators (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017) can be a powerful method to cultivate critical pedagogies.

Practical implications Teachers across grade levels, schools, disciplines and backgrounds can collectively organize to cultivate critical ELA pedagogies.

Originality/value Although coordinated opportunities to engage in critical inquiry work across k-16 contexts are rare, the authors believe that the knowledge, skills and confidence they gained through this professional inquiry sensitized them to oppressive curricular norms and expanded their repertoires of resistance.

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