Contribution to Book
Chapter 16: The Many Layers of My Life: How My Relationships Shaped Me
Becoming: Transformative Storytelling for Education's Future
(2021)
Abstract
Becoming: Transformative Storytelling for Education’s Future is a collection of powerful stories about teaching and learning. The book illuminates an inquiry process for educators to reflect on and tell their own stories of teaching and learning, in order to fuel personal, professional, and organizational transformation. The inquiry and storytelling process is modeled throughout the book by the author chapters. Through their educational autobiographies, the authors uncover opportunities for making changes in their own educational practices as well as those of the organizations in which they work and teach. The stories also surface challenges in the broader education system and the authors consider the ways to create more equitable, culturally sustaining, and transformative educational experiences for all students. Readers can engage with the stories in the volume to inspire their own personal and professional growth, and perhaps even more powerfully, readers can dive into the process themselves.
Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (1989) aptly notes that “storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning” (p. 34). Stories help to create human connection and serve as powerful tools to support us in deciphering cultural norms, events, experiences, and realities (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Mládková, 2013; Ricoeur 1991). Through stories, we can come to better understand ourselves, our communities, and our broader social, historical and cultural milieu. Critical storytelling (like critical theory and critical pedagogy), pushes us to interrogate and re-imagine the systems we inhabit and the cultural norms we embody (Barone, 1992; Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011;Solórzano & Yosso, 2009). When understood and utilized as an educational tool, critical storytelling becomes a profound meaning-making process that results in personal growth, professional learning, and organizational transformation. Storytelling therefore becomes “not...a place at which to arrive, but...a place to begin inquiry” (Gallagher, 2010, p. 52). When educators take on an inquiry stance toward their practice, they are better positioned to develop and maintain equitable and transformative educational practices (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2015).
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring May, 2021
Editor
Laura Colket, Tracy Penny Light, and M. Adam Carswell
Publisher
DIO Press
Citation Information
David B. Ross. "Chapter 16: The Many Layers of My Life: How My Relationships Shaped Me" New YorkBecoming: Transformative Storytelling for Education's Future (2021) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david-ross/118/