ABSTRACT
Teacher candidates (TCs) must navigate personal, experiential, and theoretical discourses of learning to teach to establish a teaching identity. This article describes a critical case example of digital storytelling to imagine a future classroom. The qualitative research design situates the TCs’ digital stories as a performance and analyzes the art form to consider how they might use these texts to imagine and make visible this negotiation. The critical case shows how the TCs used the digital story to make sense of personal experiences, their image of an ideal teacher, methods coursework, and the personal struggle inherent across these sometimes disparate voices of learning to teach. Findings indicate that digital storytelling expands TCs’ reflective practice in the supportive environment of a teacher education program.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Linda Skidmore Coggin
Linda Skidmore Coggin received her PhD in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. She currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Her research explores how telling and imagining personal stories create humanizing pedagogies that foster more equitable participation and make sense of learning in all levels of classrooms.
Sharon Daley
Sharon Daley is a clinical assistant professor at Indiana University. She joined the Indiana University faculty after 20 years as a public school teacher and a literacy coach. Her research interests center around teacher education, with a focus on reflective practices and identity development through the use of digital storytelling.
Jackie Sydnor
Jackie Sydnor is an assistant professor of elementary literacy education at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her research and teaching focus on supporting aspiring teachers’ professional identity development and reflective practice through the use of digital storytelling and video annotation.
Tammi R. Davis
Tammi R. Davis is an assistant professor of elementary education at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri. For over 30 years she has worked in the field of education as a classroom teacher and then as a teacher educator. Her research and teaching focus on the lives of teachers, self-study, narrative inquiry, and reflective practice through the use of digital storytelling.