Teachers’ Pedagogical Stories and the Shaping of Classroom Participation: “The Dancer” and “Graveyard Shift at the 7-11”

Abstract

This article illustrates how teachers’ pedagogical stories inscribe worlds, beliefs, and identities that position their students’ participation and performance. Based on a view of storytelling as a rich site for observing teaching as the joint social construction of “self” as successful academic performer and social actor, the article analyzes two teachers’ storytelling practices that, unbeknown to them, were integral to teaching and learning in their high school classrooms. The two teachers held contrasting visions of education and accomplishment. The analyses of the teachers’ object lesson stories illustrate the particular dispositions, beliefs, and values that they manifested for their own roles as teachers as well as for their students’ roles as learners. Each set of stories appealed to a particular demographic group of students. By juxtaposing these unique narrative repertoires, the article extends sociocultural theories of how successful student participation is a local, interactive accomplishment tied in complex ways to larger social narratives.