Teacher educators’ strategies for using pre-service teacher-authored stories in teacher education.

Resumen

Cases have long been used in teacher education to provide examples of teaching to broaden the experience of pre-service teachers (PSTs). These cases are often written as exemplars by experienced teachers to pass on their wisdom, which can lead to a perceived gap of ability between the author and the pre-service readers. To combat this one could champion peer voice through the use of PST-authored stories. This study sought to investigate the ways that PST-authored stories may be used in teacher education, as it is not enough to simply prescribe a number of cases in a reading list and hope that PSTs will read them. This paper reports on the responses of two expert Science teacher educators who were part of a larger study that explored the uses of PST-authored stories. Interviews revealed key conversation points, with a half being common to both teacher educators. The responses from the teacher educators were classified into ‘how’ responses that gave strategies for ‘how’ the PST-authored stories could be used, and ‘why’ responses that outlined the reasoning of the teacher educators, with the ‘why’ responses being more frequent.