Who rebels? Gender and class in stories of irreverence and resistance

Abstract

This paper explores stories of rebellion that were told by six white female teachers in a life-history research project. By juxtaposing transcript excerpts, the paper explores the ways in which class operated within stories about forms of gender subordination. Drawing on the work of Luisa Passerini, the author explores how these stories worked as a dialogic between the past and present, in which the participants' current identities, as progressive teachers, got projected back onto the past, so that their stories worked to construct them as always having been "protagonists for change" (Passerini, 1987). It also explores the differences between how the stories were told in the individual interviews and then retold in the group sessions. The juxtapositions and the application of Passerini's dialogical framework challenge the assumption that stories are simply "telling" and point to the pedagogical potential stories hold when we take a second look.