Everybody has a story: storytelling as a community building exploration of equity and access

Abstract

Utilizing the voices of students in an undergraduate teacher preparation program, this article describes the use of a collaborative storytelling experience. Situated within the context of cooperative base groups, this collaborative storytelling has been designed to help pre-service teachers examine their own experiences in school in an effort to broaden their perspectives and begin to understand the classroom as a complex social and cultural system. The storytelling serves as a foundation for learning the knowledge and skills and acquiring the dispositions necessary to utilize cooperative learning as a core pedagogical orientation.

Keywords:

• cooperative learning
• equity pedagogy
• complex instruction
• narrative inquiry
• teacher preparation
• status

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my West Chester University students for permission to excerpt passages from their stories.