Shifting Polarized Positions: A Narrative Approach to Teacher Education

The authors of this book teach foundation courses to pre-service and in-service teachers in Canada, Israel, and the United States. Their students often express uncompromising views. As a result, the authors have found that culturally heterogeneous settings have been points of departure for inquiry and cross-cultural encounters of difference, serving as assets rather than hindrances. Among people of differing ethnic, religious, socio-economic, political, ideological and gendered backgrounds, the telling of experiential stories has shifted personally and culturally polarized positions. What became most important in their work was to encourage narrative rather than argumentative modes of expression. The inquiry tended to stay alive if the instructor was able to access and incorporate into her curricular decisions both the mutual interest and the personal tension that continually emerged in interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics, for it was such a personal dynamic that subtly moved an individual inquiry forward and helped to alleviate animosity and polarization.