By Chart and Chance and Passion: The Importance of Relational Knowing in Learning to Teach

ABSTRACT

This paper is a narrative drawn from a six-year conversation with two female elementary school teachers as they are learning to teach literacy. The teachers were part of a larger longitudinal investigation on learning to teach that began with their preservice teacher education programs at a research university on the West Coast. This report summarizes conversational data collected in both classrooms during the fifth year. The stories that emerge suggest that program emphases—a cognitive understanding of both the popular and research-based approaches to literacy instruction—was insufficient for teaching multiethnic children in urban classrooms. Rather, Teachers' relational knowing stands out in the narrative. Factors that supported these Teachers' knowing through relationship included opportunities for sustained conversation while learning to teach, a passionate and political belief in themselves and their children as knowledge creators and evaluators, a willingness to create eclectic approaches to literacy characterized by relational integrity, and a propensity to look critically at both their children and themselves in relationship to evaluate the results.