Teachers’ Stories Created Through Collaborative Group Narratives
摘要
This chapter presents key processes in narrative co-construction of an online reflective community of teachers with diverse backgrounds. The reflective community was formed to bridge the gaps between the curriculums and practices of pre-tertiary and tertiary English language education in Japan through creating a community among teachers from different institutions, that is, junior high school, high school, and university. All the teachers participated in the community as practitioners sharing their lessons for discussion. The research question explored how the teachers from diverse backgrounds experience collaborative narratives. The chapter first describes the construction of group cohesion through intertextuality, illustrating how one teacher’s individual text became a group text. It then discusses the process of co-construction of narratives through the roles of examples, questions, and negotiation related to a problem raised by one teacher. Finally, the chapter describes challenges of a novice teacher’s participation in groups and in becoming a collaborator. The chapter highlights the challenges of fostering equal collaboration and equity among members with varied levels of experiences, relationships, and positionalities. The chapter concludes by emphasising the importance for researchers to be reflexive of their positionalities and of their relationships with other participants in the creation of an equitable community of teachers.