Autorentext

Kinga Varga-Dobai is Professor of Language and Literacy in the School of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College.

Klappentext

This book explores how storytelling can be used as a care-oriented, trauma-informed, and socially, culturally, and emotionally sustaining teaching tool in teacher education.

Storytelling is not simply a teaching strategy or writing technique, but a pedagogical framework and embodied methodology - a way of thinking, learning, and being that supports questioning, reflection, and connection with students and preservice teachers. The book positions storytelling as a transformative literacy practice that integrates care, cognition, identity, and learning and is grounded in relational ethics and transnational feminist perspectives on voice, identity, and belonging.

Through storytelling, students and teachers engage not only in literacy practices but also in acts of care - for self, for others, and for the larger world. Reading, writing, conversing, questioning, and analyzing become transformative practices that cultivate intellectual growth and emotional wellbeing by uniting body and mind, experience and imagination, memory and hope. The book examines narrative methodology, reflection, reader response, expressive writing, object narratives, visual storytelling, and role-play as pedagogical approaches that foster active participation, critical thinking, and meaningful collaboration. In this sense, storytelling is presented as an embodied literacy practice that supports meaning-making and professional judgment alongside academic development.

This is a valuable resource for teacher educators in literacy and language education, as well as preservice teachers seeking to develop reflective, relational, and care-oriented pedagogical practices.

Inhalt

1. Chapter Storytelling as a Methodology of Care: Theoretical Foundations for Literacy and Wellbeing Pause: My Name 2. What's in a Name Revisited: Relationships, Reflections, and Becoming Teachers Pause: Sand Ice-cream Memories 3. Practicing Wellness through Embodied Literacies Pause: Love Is a Sight Word: A Found Poem 4. Reading as Response: Connecting Literature to Lived Experience Pause: Anya 5. Grief Literacy: Writing as Witness Pause: Pages 6. From Emotion to Need: Contemplative Writing and Nonviolent Communication Pause: A Note from Prison 7. Objects of the Heart: Telling Stories through Artifactual Literacy Pause: The Teacher the Mirror 8. Acting Out: Exploring Performed Language and Problem-Solving through Role-Play Pause: Language as River 9. Rivers of Language: Stories in an AI World Pause: Found Poems in the Voice of Bilingual 7-year-old 10. Data and Assessment as Storytelling: Multilingual Stories Pause: My Mother Tongue Has an Accent 11. Beyond Binaries: Teaching with Intention Pause 12. Towards a Pedagogy of Listening with Compassion Coda: Stories That Don't Translate