A Narrative Inquiry Based on Teacher Experience with The Learning Through Storytelling Curriculum

Abstract

What can curriculum do? When faced with a global pandemic, lockdowns, and virtual learning in the fall of 2020, I began working with Roger Thurow and a hunger group at my university to create an English language arts curriculum focused on hunger titled Learning Through Storytelling. Through the real-world storytelling of hunger that Thurow writes based on his travel as a foreign correspondent, I wanted to further explore the story of hunger and how the use of narrative could influence the work of teachers in a tumultuous moment in history. I wanted to investigate not only this exchange of storytelling, but also the stories teachers and students might put together after participating in the curriculum as well as how we can collectively meet our students’ needs. I implemented narrative inquiry methods to answer the following questions: “In what ways do ninth- through 12th-grade public school teachers describe their community’s story surrounding hunger?” and “How do ninth- through 12th-grade public school teachers report the experience of teaching curriculum within the current context? I conducted semi structured interviews as well as evaluations to collect data on how teacher participants used Learning Through Storytelling as a curriculum to address hunger.