A Tao of Narrative: Dynamic Splicing of Teacher Stories

Abstract

In this article, I explore a cross‐cultural narrative inquiry method through a narrative inquiry about the process of reconstruction of five teacher stories. With dramatic, different cultural backgrounds, the five narrative inquirers—four teacher‐researchers and myself—recovered and reconstructed our teacher stories by telling and living, retelling and reliving them in our 2‐year life experience research. We simulated the interaction of teacher storytelling that originated in our multicultural teacher education classes. In pairs, we took equal turns to listen to and tell stories. We suspended our preconceived judgments about one another's cultures while listening to individual stories, and we resonated with our own stories. We changed partners periodically so that each one had a chance to work with everyone else. Despite our cultural differences, we bonded as friends, our teacher stories included one another's stories, and we multiplied and compounded our teacher stories while retelling and reliving them in our classroom practice. I identified an intersubjective ontology in the Taoist philosophy and in Buber's I and Thou theory as a theoretical framework supporting the interactions found in our research. I recognized that the intersubjective ontology could best generate cultural creativity when different and opposing cultures come into contact, whereby each respects the other as an equal subjectivity just as oneself, and each takes equal turns to listen to and tell stories of experiences. I developed an artistic representation of the interactions among the narrative inquirers and the teacher stories, splicing a web of Chinese knotworks.