Story telling – Teaching & Learning Research Initiative

Understand Me: Storied-Conversations as Afa for Strengthening Relationships, Curriculum and Pedagogies

Mā ngā korero tuku iho tātou me ō tātou ao e kitea ai, e rongongia ai, e whaiora ai.[1] E tatou te fauina i tatou ma a tatou si’osi’omaga, e ala iā tatou tala.[2] We craft ourselves and our worlds in stories. Understand Me was born out of an aspirational exploration of ways for teachers to deepen relationships with young children and families to open space for their knowledges to be valued in the everyday educational curriculum. The origin was a desire to facilitate a shift from awareness of cultural competencies to action that values family pedagogies in the learning life of the classroom. Family pedagogies are everyday ways of knowing,

Literacy and narrative in the early years: Zooming in and zooming out

Introduction This project is about exploring and strengthening young children’s story-telling expertise. Building on research that shows that children’s narrative competence is linked to later literacy learning at school, we wanted to understand more fully how conditions for literacy learning are, and could be, supported within early years education settings. Using a design-based intervention methodology and a multi-layered analytical approach we observed and analysed story-telling episodes within early childhood settings and classrooms to understand, within these episodes, the contributions of contexts and story-partners for children’s early development of narrative competence. Our aim was to contribute to the international literature and develop storying strategies with and for teachers. Literacy and narrative We

Researching Understanding of Learning and Teaching (RULT): a case study in using practice-based research to develop a school-wide learning community

Project Description This research project investigates how teachers who are using a peer-coaching model to help each other gain a deeper understanding of teaching and learning can distil and share their emerging experiential knowledge, and how this influences future praxis (thinking and acting) in teaching. The school aims to build a reflective learning community where teachers collaborate deliberately to support improved outcomes for students. The project involved four cycles of activity in which the “learning stories” from the peer-coaching model will be documented and used to promote fresh questions about individual and collective learning. Project Outputs Conner, L. & Mayo, E. (2008). Challenging assumptions about research: Using self-study research to develop learning