A Cautionary Tale: A Dialogic Re-reading of a Student Teacher’s Visual Narrative

In the past, narrative inquiry into teaching has relied mostly on written materials in the form of autobiographies, biographies and personal diaries and journals. This paper changes the focus from the written mode to the visual-verbal by examining one student-teacher’s hand drawn picture book as a representation of her becoming a teacher. The analytic aim is to produce a re-reading of one student teacher’s text that extends and critiques her “common-sense”interpretation. Rather than accepting the teacher-as-author’s intended reading as definitive, this paper seeks a different reading from a social interaction and a political perspective. The re-reading is produced by asking how and what membership categories are being constructed visually-verbally in the telling of the narrative and ultimately, whose interests are being served by the acceptance of a common-sense reading. The analytic aim is achieved by establishing a dialogue between various theories of narrative and membership categorization analysis and critical discourse analysis so as to arrive at an increasingly critical understanding of student teacher narrative reflection. (Narrative theory and analysis, Membership categorisation analysis, Critical discourse analysis, Teacher reflection, Visual narrative)