Story as vehicle for examining preservice teacher understanding of culturally responsive teaching

While U.S. classrooms become increasingly diverse, teacher candidates remain predominantly White, middle-class, monolingual females who are unprepared to meet the needs of diverse students. Culturally responsive teaching holds potential for creating cultural congruence between teachers and students and for empowering students to succeed academically and bring about positive social change. The purpose of this qualitative study, which used constructivist grounded theory within narrative inquiry, was to examine preservice teachers’ understanding of culturally responsive teaching and to explore the use of a fictional story as a catalyst for narrative inquiry. The teacher/researcher began by writing an online fictional story of a first-year teacher to inform participants, who were student teachers, about culturally responsive teaching, to provide them a framework for organizing ideas and reflecting, to provide reference points for dialogue, and to encourage participants to tell their own stories. Data sources included responses to reflective questions, a pre- and post-survey, interviews, a focus group, and course assignments.

Results showed that by the end of the study, participants had developed a working understanding of culturally responsive teaching, but application of it in their classrooms was limited. In exit interviews, participants shared their own poignant stories, adding to the narrative element in this study. Their stories were woven into a revision of the final chapter of the fictional story, as participants became new characters. Results imply that informing preservice teachers about culturally responsive teaching is needed and can have positive outcomes in knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Results also indicate that a fictional story can be useful for initiating narrative inquiry and prompting participants’ own storytelling. Further research is needed to examine the use of culturally responsive teaching one to five years into graduates’ teaching careers, and to examine preservice teachers’ understanding of additional topics of culturally responsive teaching. Additional studies are also needed to further explore the use of fiction in teaching and narrative inquiry.

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