Teachers’ Change Stories & Storybases
Visiting University of Kent at Canterbury this week, I met Sally Fincher. She is running an intruiging project called Change Stories, a narrative approach to eliciting accounts of educational practitioner learning:
“Our Question
- When do you make changes to your teaching?
- What gives you the idea?
- What do you do then?
Our Idea: We aim to gather hundreds of real examples of how and when and why educators change their practice.”
This is a project as part of her work on a Cognitive Edge course, arising from the work that Dave Snowden has been developing over the last decade, on the application of complexity theory to sensemaking. The narrative database you’re taken to provides an engaging user interface which uses graphical slides and triangles to provide an expressive medium:
If this is of interest then check out Joanna Kwiat’s Storymaking Project [blog], who reviewed narrative theory with respect to narrative technology development, designed a story annotation scheme, and evaluated its use via a prototype storybase.
Tom Carey read this and pointed me to the Elixr Merlot project, which uses video clips to tell the stories of educators innovating:
http://elixr.merlot.org
The project won an award from the POD Network (U.S. equivalent of SEDA) as innovation project of the year in 2010 for Faculty Development Using Technology.
Souza, T., Carey, T., McMartin, F., Ambrosino, R. and J. Grimes, Using Multimedia Case Stories of Exemplary Teaching For Faculty Development, chapter in To Improve the Academy, Vol. 29, Professional and Organizational Network, 2010. pp. 60-73