Helen Woodley's critical important action research in a growing field of education is an investigation into the effect of working on a toxic schools on teacher mental health and wellbeing. Four teachers share their experiences of working in toxic schools across a variety of settings. And strategies for coping in such schools are shared including a wider look at how school culture can be developed to better support staff.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Storytelling--or narrative--is gaining acceptance as an important tool for professional development, research, and teaching. This book shows how teachers and educators can use stories of their professional experiences to reflect on their own practice, articulate values and beliefs, give shape and form to teaching theory, and better understand decision-making processes. The book offers strategies for generating, sharing, and using narrativeand illustrates its points with many rich classroom stories.Individual chapters built around specific themes show how teachers use narrative to forge connections, learn from students, reflect upon experience, resolve conflict, develop as professionals, and enter the educational dialogue. A wealth of examples and specific suggestions show teachers at all levels, preschool through high school, how to compose and give voice to their own stories, forcing them to dig beneath the surface, think more deeply about teaching and learning, and become truly reflective practitioners.

Research on teacher learning has too often excluded personal development in considering professional development. This timely book argues that the development of a professional identity is inextricable from personal identity. It suggests that when teachers are given the opportunity to compose their own stories of learning within a supportive community, they can then begin to compose new narratives of identity and practice. This book is a critical tool for educators seeking to refine their teaching practice and author their own development.

This book illustrates how the experiential histories of teachers shape and inform the knowledge of teachers as professionals. Situating personal experiences into the context of social, political, and economic events gives clarity to the intercultural dynamics of being Chinese and Western. What can we learn from each other to transform our teaching and learning? The book engages in a cross-cultural perspective that is highly relevant for teachers, teacher education, curriculum making and policy planning for a global community. The book is also an invitation to internationalize the classroom for teaching and learning in a diverse and global world, and to educators and policy makers to expand our understanding of cross-cultural complexities for an increasingly diversified and global community. By viewing the classroom through the multiple lens of different cultures, educators have an opportunity to cross over to see, experience, and understand how others live.

This study addresses the role of autobiographical teacher stories in the ethical imperative to know well in teaching First Nations students. As an account of my own construction of my teacher knowledge, the thesis makes the claim that teachers' knowing, as expressed through personal narratives, can be a valid explanation of and justification for actions in the classroom. Within this context, the study offers itself in part as an enactment of what feminist philosopher Lorraine Code calls a "storied epistemology." The thesis begins with "The Trickster Brought Them," a story about my own classroom practice involving First Nations students, which acts as the backdrop for the study. This narrative is an articulation of my own teacher knowledge in response to the question, "How do I know what I ought to do?" in the literature classroom with First Nations adult learners. How I answer this question becomes the central problematic of the thesis. Chapter 1 introduces the nature of the problem, my method, and plan of the thesis. In Chapter 2, I describe the British Columbia postsecondary college system within which I teach and tell my teacher stories such as "The Trickster." I then elaborate the influence of biographical forms on knowledge claim, after which I present excerpts from my teaching autobiography, and consider the world in which I live and work from my perspective as a woman. Chapter 3 selectively surveys the literature on teacher knowledge: Argyris and Schön's work on "the reflective practitioner," researchers who use teachers' stories to make determinations about teaching and learning, critical and feminist pedagogies as they relate to stories about teaching, and educational theorists who use stories about teaching. Chapter 4 explicates Lorraine Code's theories of responsible knowing, epistemic community, and storied epistemologies, addressing how they support my use of stories as the justification for my classroom knowledge. Chapter 5 returns to "The Trickster," recapitulates the study, and sketches out unresolved problems in using stories to articulate knowledge claims when teaching postsecondary literature and composition to First Nations students.