Overview

This book explores how storytelling can be used as a care-oriented, trauma-informed, and socially, culturally, and emotionally sustaining teaching tool in teacher education. Storytelling is not simply a teaching strategy or writing technique, but a pedagogical framework and embodied methodology — a way of thinking, learning, and being that supports questioning, reflection, and connection with students and preservice teachers. The book positions storytelling as a transformative literacy practice that integrates care, cognition, identity, and learning and is grounded in relational ethics and transnational feminist perspectives on voice, identity, and belonging. Through storytelling, students and teachers engage not only in literacy practices but also in acts of care — for self, for others, and for the larger world. Reading, writing, conversing, questioning, and analyzing become transformative practices that cultivate intellectual growth and emotional wellbeing by uniting body and mind, experience and imagination, memory and hope. The book examines narrative methodology, reflection, reader response, expressive writing, object narratives, visual storytelling, and role-play as pedagogical approaches that foster active participation, critical thinking, and meaningful collaboration. In this sense, storytelling is presented as an embodied literacy practice that supports meaning-making and professional judgment alongside academic development. This is a valuable resource for teacher educators in literacy and language education, as well as preservice teachers seeking to develop reflective, relational, and care-oriented pedagogical practices.

Full Product Details

9781041244448

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Kinga Varga-Dobai has given us a gift that feels like a soft and worn hand-stitched quilt passed down from a great-grandmother. Immersing readers in tender stories about her life and stories from her teacher education students that shake loose dominant stereotypes of education majors in the United States, Kinga moves the needle for literacy education to wellness and wholeness: the uniting of spirit, body, and mind. Readers will soften under Kinga’s storytelling methodology and make plans to incorporate her storytelling practices with their own teacher education students. They will also expand and sharpen their analytical tools, learning from Kinga's incisive feminist critiques of the frameworks available to make sense of power and oppression in the United States. Do yourself a favor - settle in with this book and begin to imagine the pedagogies necessary to live and heal in an uncertain and tumultuous world."" - Stephanie Jones, The University of Georgia, Meigs Distinguished Professor, Mary Frances Early College of Education, USA ""Kinga Varga-Dobai’s Storytelling, Wellbeing, and Teacher Education names the gaps and meets the longings in my education as a teacher, professor. Centering storytelling as an embodied praxis that centers care within and as relation, she dismantles the stubborn, unrelenting, and often unconscious binaries that lodge themselves into educational structures aligned with power. Her insightful analyses and theorizing are accompanied by and interdependent with stories from her own sites of learning. In the Pause, her engaged storytelling breathes into what she offers, inviting a collective disentanglement from power and oriented toward education’s potential for learning and liberation. Storytelling, Wellbeing, and Teacher Education is essential reading."" - Kimberlee Pérez, Editor, Text & Performance Quarterly; Associate Professor of Performance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA ""This book offers a rigorous and theoretically grounded examination of storytelling as an embodied methodology for advancing teacher wellbeing, intercultural competence, and reflective pedagogical practice. Drawing on feminist, narrative, and literacy scholarship, it demonstrates how narrative inquiry can disrupt reductive binaries, cultivate relational ways of knowing, and support humane, equity‑oriented teacher education. It constitutes a much‑needed contribution to contemporary debates in literacy education and teacher preparation at a time when the role of teachers is more important than ever. - Andrea Peto, Professor, Central European University, Vienna, Austria This book is a deeply humanizing and intellectually rigorous contribution to literacy and teacher education. Through use of storytelling as a feminist poststructuralist methodology of care, Kinga Varga-Dobai bridges theory and practice to show how her pedagogy elicits complex emotions, identities, and relational knowing in her students and self. Her mosaic of beautifully crafted stories and theoretical provocations is an essential read for teacher educators, literacy scholars, and practitioners committed to crafting culturally sustaining teaching with an open heart.""- Ruth Harman, The University of Georgia, Professor, TESOL and World Language Education, Mary Frances Early College of Education, USA

Kinga Varga-Dobai has given us a gift that feels like a soft and worn hand-stitched quilt passed down from a great-grandmother. Immersing readers in tender stories about her life and stories from her teacher education students that shake loose dominant stereotypes of education majors in the United States, Kinga moves the needle for literacy education to wellness and wholeness: the uniting of spirit, body, and mind. Readers will soften under Kinga’s storytelling methodology and make plans to incorporate her storytelling practices with their own teacher education students. They will also expand and sharpen their analytical tools, learning from Kinga's incisive feminist critiques of the frameworks available to make sense of power and oppression in the United States. Do yourself a favor - settle in with this book and begin to imagine the pedagogies necessary to live and heal in an uncertain and tumultuous world. - Stephanie Jones, The University of Georgia, Meigs Distinguished Professor, Mary Frances Early College of Education, USA Kinga Varga-Dobai’s Storytelling, Wellbeing, and Teacher Education names the gaps and meets the longings in my education as a teacher, professor. Centering storytelling as an embodied praxis that centers care within and as relation, she dismantles the stubborn, unrelenting, and often unconscious binaries that lodge themselves into educational structures aligned with power. Her insightful analyses and theorizing are accompanied by and interdependent with stories from her own sites of learning. In the Pause, her engaged storytelling breathes into what she offers, inviting a collective disentanglement from power and oriented toward education’s potential for learning and liberation. Storytelling, Wellbeing, and Teacher Education is essential reading. - Kimberlee Pérez, Editor, Text & Performance Quarterly; Associate Professor of Performance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA This book offers a rigorous and theoretically grounded examination of storytelling as an embodied methodology for advancing teacher wellbeing, intercultural competence, and reflective pedagogical practice. Drawing on feminist, narrative, and literacy scholarship, it demonstrates how narrative inquiry can disrupt reductive binaries, cultivate relational ways of knowing, and support humane, equity‑oriented teacher education. It constitutes a much‑needed contribution to contemporary debates in literacy education and teacher preparation at a time when the role of teachers is more important than ever. - Andrea Peto, Professor, Central European University, Vienna, Austria This book is a deeply humanizing and intellectually rigorous contribution to literacy and teacher education. Through use of storytelling as a feminist poststructuralist methodology of care, Kinga Varga-Dobai bridges theory and practice to show how her pedagogy elicits complex emotions, identities, and relational knowing in her students and self. Her mosaic of beautifully crafted stories and theoretical provocations is an essential read for teacher educators, literacy scholars, and practitioners committed to crafting culturally sustaining teaching with an open heart.- Ruth Harman, The University of Georgia, Professor, TESOL and World Language Education, Mary Frances Early College of Education, USA

Author Information

Kinga Varga-Dobai is Professor of Language and Literacy in the School of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College.

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