Narrative Dialogue and Teacher Leadership for Social Justice: Re-Storying to Understand

Abstract

In this chapter, we use narrative dialogue both to demonstrate a method of inquiry and to advocate for a narrative approach to develop teacher leaders for social justice. We engaged in an extended dialogue about our narratives for the purpose of understanding ourselves as teacher leaders for social justice. As three doctoral students and an adviser (Marilyn), we had talked about our lives as teachers and doctoral students. We were comfortable talking about teaching and academic ideas, yet we had quite different backgrounds. Lindsayanne was beginning her second year as a doctoral student after having taught 7 years, Hilarie was writing her dissertation in her fourth year of the doctoral program and had previously taught for 6 years, Daniel was a first-year doctoral student from Concepcion, Chile, and had completed a master’s thesis using narrative life histories, and Marilyn was a professor with research interests in collaboration research and teacher education. In spite of these differences, we enthusiastically embraced this project of writing about teacher leadership.