Narrative as a Cultural Tool for Experiential Learning in Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper uses perspectives drawn from work on communities of practice, sociocultural theory, and cultural historical activity theory to explore how trainee teachers can be socialized into using specific narrative forms as tools to organize and make sense of experience and, therefore, learn from it. The paper analyzes a single transcript of collaborative narrative construction among a trainee teacher, school-based mentor, and university tutor and argues that such collaborative narrative construction provides the mechanism for socialisation or apprenticeship to making socially situated forms of narrative. This exploration contributes to an understanding of the nature of teacher knowledge and how it is developed in trainee teachers.