Resonance in Preservice Teacher Inquiry

Abstract

Practical knowledge data was generated as four preservice teachers shared experiential narratives. As their project supervisor, I wanted to understand more clearly how they engaged with, and reconstructed, their practical knowledge. I observed a process where, through experiential storytelling, preservice teachers connected specific items in current or past experiences to a narrative of their own or someone else’s experience. In this process, they subconsciously created metaphorical correspondences between two sets of narrativized experiences. I called this process resonance and found its educational usefulness maximized when preservice teachers shared their narrative inquiries and stayed close to concrete experiential contexts.