Conference Agenda

Rapid societal transformations are redefining professional landscapes, placing social professions in a need of continuous professional development to rethink their identities and practices (Dvir, 2024). Professional development is here seen as a learning process continuing throughout one’s professional life and shaped through meaningful interactions between individuals and their work environments, including the cultural, historical, and social conditions (see e.g. Kelchtermans, 2009). Hence, there is a growing need for new approaches to professional development that address the changing demands of the professions.

Narrative pedagogies, understood as “the art of teaching with and through stories” (Oliver-Álvarez et al., 2024, p. 394), have become widespread in professional development across various professions and fields, including teacher education, and continue to evolve in innovative ways. This symposium explores emerging narrative pedagogies and the diverse ways they are understood and applied to support professional development. We build on Bruner’s (1987) concept of narrative knowing - which suggests that people understand themselves and the world around them through stories - to highlight the value of narrative as a pedagogical approach. Narrative pedagogies rest on the view that stories are central to transmitting and reshaping culture; changing the stories can change people’s lives and society (Smith & Sparkes, 2008).

The philosophical underpinnings of narrative pedagogies are rooted in social constructionism (Estola et al., 2014), which posits that knowledge is co-constructed with others through a social meaning-making process. Narrative pedagogies aim to enhance individuals’ knowledge actively, encouraging construction of stories from their own lives and engagement with others’ or imaginary stories, rather than fostering passive, spectator knowledge. Central to this process is relationality, which emphasizes the encounters and interactions between people as fundamental to learning and development. A particularly extensive line of research and fruitfulness of narrative pedagogies has been noted in the professional development of teachers and medical professionals (e.g., nurses). The research literature has introduced various ways of employing narrative pedagogies (e.g., Goodson & Gill, 2011). These pedagogies facilitate telling of an individual's experiences, becoming aware of one’s own tacit knowledge and beliefs, as well as sharing of experiences, challenging them and connecting them with theoretical perspectives (Kelchtermans, 2014). Overall, they provide opportunities for professionals to build their skills and confidence needed to navigate the uncertainties inherent in many fields of work (Strangeway & Papatraianou, 2016).

The four presentations included in this symposium all contribute to the following research question: How can narrative pedagogies enhance professional development and learning? This symposium broadens the current repertoire of the narrative pedagogies by exploring reflective vignettes, the method of empathy-based stories, visual narratives, and the collective biography method. These contributions from European and Asian contexts (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Japan) illustrate how narrative pedagogies can be employed with participants from different fields, such as with pre-service teachers, medical students, teacher educators and academics, and both individually and collectively. The contributions also highlight such aspects of professional development, i.e. emotions, moral, gender and power, that may otherwise be challenging to address. Thus, the symposium aims to broaden our understanding of what the use of narrative pedagogies can mean for the professional development of the participants in question. Ultimately, the symposium stimulates discussion on how narrative pedagogies could be applied and used more boldly in various educational settings, and to consider the kinds of narrative literacy and understanding such practices may require from those involved.

The content of professional development shouldn’t be restricted to the technical or instrumental dimensions of handling the ‘how’-questions (Hargreaves, 1995; Kelchtermans, 2023). In particular professional practices that are deeply relational, like for example those of medical doctors or teachers, also involve moral challenges, conflicting interests and power issues, all of which don’t leave the professionals involved emotionally indifferent. Preparing those professionals for the emotional dimension in their job is therefore of paramount importance. This is for example reflected in the CanMedsroles, an internationally accepted framework to structure the medical education curriculum that explicitly acknowledges and values the competency of dealing with the emotional dimension of the profession (CanMEDS // Guide). In this paper we critically reflect on more than a decade of a particular narrative pedagogy in medical education aimed at facilitating students’ learning from emotional experiences. More in particular, medical undergraduate students were required as part of the portfolio assignments for their final internship, to produce a reflective vignette on an emotionally significant experience (critical incident technique). The individual reflective accounts were used as starting points for collective sharing and unpacking of the narratives in structured meetings with peers (up to 100 participants at the time) and facilitated by two senior staff members with complementary expertise (one medical, the other educational). We reflectively reconstruct the rationale behind the pedagogical set up (setting, preparation, enactment of the facilitation) and identify the critical conditions determining its meaningfulness and learning potential. Our data collection and analysis encompassed individual autobiographical reflection by as well as a duo-interview of the facilitators, portfolio vignettes as well as feedback from the participating students. The findings reveal the importance of balancing individual reflection as well as collective narrative sharing, the collegial interplay of the complementary competencies of both facilitators, the interactive unpacking of the shared narratives by both embracing and acknowledging the experiences in the narrative accounts, while at the same time offering different lenses or perspectives to understand or re-interpret them. Our findings show how the ethical, emotional, political and technical aspects are closely intertwined in their constitution of the professional practice. We conclude that the envisaged professional learning in education for the professions (i.e. medical education) should not be conceptualized in terms of isolated or juxtaposed dimensions, but rather addressed in its complex entanglement.

Hargreaves, A. (1995). Development and desire. A post-modern perspective. In T. R. Guskey & M. Huberman (Eds.), Professional development in education: New paradigms and perspectives (pp. 9–34). Teachers College Press. Kelchtermans, G. (2023). Continuing professional development: Negotiating the zip. In I. Menter (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Teacher Education Research (pp.551-574). Springer.

Teaching is characterised by a high density of challenging situations that require decision-making; on average, teachers make a decision every second minute of teaching (Russ et al., 2016). These teaching situations also have moral implications, as teachers’ actions influence students in ways that may be beneficial and/or harmful (Hansen, 2001). The process of pedagogical decision-making reflects teachers’ pedagogical thinking, perceptions and beliefs, which are not immediately observable. One way to examine these processes is through teachers’ narratives of such situations, as these narratives reveal teachers’ emotions, thoughts, and interpretations (Elbaz-Luwisch, 2005). These beliefs are often shaped by their own school experiences and studies and may therefore be deeply rooted and difficult to verbalize or even change (Fives et al., 2016). How to study decision-making of pre-service teachers who may not have much teaching experience and when their knowledge of teaching is mainly informed by their own experience as students or general discourse of teachers? To this end, we have applied the method of empathy-based stories in studies conducted in Austrian, Finnish, and Japanese contexts (Hyry-Beihammer et al., 2022). We prepared a research-based, realistic description of a teaching situation, referred to as a frame story (Wallin et al., 2019). Pre-service teachers were asked to read the frame story and to imagine themselves in the teacher’s position. Their task was to describe in detail how they would act in the situation, the thoughts and emotions the situation would evoke, and the reasons underlying these responses. Analysing the students’ written stories through narrative and positioning analysis (Bamberg & Georgapoulou, 2008) showed that they proposed diverse solutions to the frame story, for example by suggesting a variety of teaching methods, while also revealing misconceptions that did not align with research-based knowledge. They also used moral imagination to approach the situation from multiple perspectives (e.g., teachers, students, parents, and multi-professional experts), highlighting the importance of a multiperspective view in today’s highly diverse socio-cultural landscape. In our presentation, we discuss how writing and unpacking stories produced with different prompts can reveal pre-service teachers’ thinking and support both self- and joint reflection by making their perspectives and beliefs about learning and teaching visible and open for discussion. Reflecting on deeply held beliefs about teaching and teacher identity supports professional development across career stages. Imaginative writing, in particular, offers an emotionally safe way to explore what matters without speaking about oneself directly (cf. Hyry-Beihammer et al., 2021).

Bamberg, M. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3), 377–396. Elbaz-Luwisch, F. (2005). Teachers’ voices: Storytelling and possibility. Information Age. Fives, H., Lacatena, N., & Gerard, L. (2015). Teachers’ beliefs about teaching (and learning). In H. Fives & M. G. Gill (Eds.), International handbook of research on teachers' beliefs (pp. 249–265). Routledge. Hansen, D. T. (2001). Teaching as a moral activity. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 826–857). AERA. Hyry-Beihammer, E.K., Lassila, E.T., Estola, E., & Uitto, M. (2022). Moral imagination in student teachers’ written stories on an ethical dilemma. European Journal of Teacher Education, 45(3), 435–449. Hyry-Beihammer, E.K., Lassila, E.T., & Uitto, M. (2021). Narrative pedagogies in cultivating teacher educators’ professional development. In L. Shagrir & S. Bar-Tal (Eds.), Exploring professional development opportunities for teacher educators (pp. 179-194). Routledge. Russ, R. S., Sherin, B. L., & Sherin, M. G. (2016). What constitutes teacher learning. In D.H. Gitomer & C.A. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 391–438). AERA. Wallin, A., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Eskola, J. (2019). The method of empathy-based stories. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 42(5), 525–535.

Despite the increasing interest in arts-based and visual methods as part of narrative research (Leitch, 2006), few studies utilize visual narratives to explore pre-service teachers’ identity construction and its emotional dimension. Furthermore, there is a notable lack of practical guidelines for implementing visual narratives as a pedagogical tool within teacher education. This presentation addresses this gap by demonstrating how to employ visual narratives as a pedagogical tool with pre-service teachers. While narratives tend to be understood as oral or written stories, using language to capture the experiences, visual narratives are stories told through, by or with visuals, i.e., photographs, drawings and collages (Bach, 2007; lisahunter, 2017). Visual narratives evoke emotions, help tell stories that might be overlooked, and encourage embodied knowledge (Kettunen et al., 2024; Eisner, 2008). Visual narratives facilitate self-awareness, allowing pre-service teachers to recognize new perspectives on what it means to be a teacher, including recognition and challenging of cultural teacher stories as well as the emergence of embodied, non-verbal narration (Kettunen, 2026). Building on these theoretical foundations, this presentation details practical strategies to facilitate the integration of visual narratives into teacher education. Specifically, it will provide three methods of generating visual narratives: combining autobiographical writings with photographs, utilizing drawing as a medium for thinking and storytelling, and employing photographs, drawings or images found from the internet as generative starting points for collage. These examples include specific guidelines for individual reflection, peer-led sharing in larger groups where the teacher is not present, as well as techniques for facilitating reflective group discussions within smaller groups of four to seven pre-service teachers. By providing these concrete guidelines, the presentation aims to offer teacher educators a roadmap for fostering deeper self-awareness and teacher identity construction of pre-service teachers.

Bach, H. (2007). Composing a visual narrative inquiry. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 280–307). Sage. Eisner, E. W. (2008). Art and knowledge. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues (pp. 3–13). Sage. Kettunen, A., Uitto, M., & Lutovac, S. (2024). Exploring the use of pre-service teachers’ visual narratives in the arts-based workshop to study emotions. In E. K. Hyry-Beihammer, O. Ylitapio-Mäntylä, & M. Uitto (Eds.), Narratives in educational research: Methodological perspectives (pp. 85–102). Springer. Kettunen, A. (2026). Pre-service teacher identity construction through visual narratives: Studying the emotional dimension. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Oulu]. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis. Leitch, R. (2006). Limitations of language: Developing arts-based creative narrative in stories of teachers’ identities. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 12(5), 549–569. lisahunter. (2017). If you see what I mean? Visual narratives: Stories told through, with, and by images. In R. Dryer, I. Davis, & e. Emerald (Eds.), Narrative research in practice (pp. 89–116). Springer.

This presentation explores the collective biography method as a narrative pedagogy utilized to support professional development and learning. The presentation draws on our reflections on using the collective biography method in our teaching in teacher education and in facilitating peer groups for teacher educators and academics. The collective biography method (also called memory-work method) was originally developed as a research method by Frigga Haug and her colleagues (Haug, 1987). However, the method has also been used as a pedagogical method in teacher education (Kutuniva & Ylitapio-Mäntylä, 2005; Ovens & Tinning, 2009) and more broadly as a data collection and analysis method in academic studies (Khawaja, 2022; Ylitapio-Mäntylä & Mäkiranta, 2010). The collective biography method entails recalling and sharing childhood memories in a group setting. These memories are then explored collectively in the group in relation to social structures or cultural and social phenomena, such as equality and gendered practices from the perspective of power constructions (Mnemo et al., 2025). The use of the collective biography method reveals the often-hidden gendered norms and cultural practices, helping participants, for example teachers and students, to recognize how these practices shape interactions and identities. In practice, the group will select together a particular theme to work with. Each participant then writes about a specific childhood event related to the selected theme. It is guided in the collective biography method that these memories should be detailed, as concrete as possible and written in the third person. The written memory is then shared and read aloud in the group. This phase is then followed by a collective reflection and analytical discussion. In the collective biography method, it is highlighted that working with memories fosters collective learning and professional development, allowing participants to co-create knowledge, ponder together varying viewpoints and to become aware of and recognize norms and practices. This aligns with the core of narrative pedagogies which lies not only in the telling and sharing of stories, but also in how they enable critical reflection, challenging, questioning, and learning (Estola et al., 2014; Kelchtermans, 2014).

Estola, E., Heikkinen, H., & Syrjälä, L. (2014). Narrative pedagogies for peer groups. In C. J. Craig & L. Orland-Barak (Eds.), International teacher education: Promising pedagogies (Part A, pp. 155–172). Emerald. Haug, F. (1987). Female sexualization. Verso. Kelchtermans, G. (2014). Narrative-biographical pedagogies in teacher education. In C. J. Craig & L. Orland-Barak (Eds.) International teacher education: Promising pedagogies (Part A, pp. 273–291). Emerald. Khawaja, I. (2022). Memory Work as Engaged Critical Pedagogy. Creating Collaborative Spaces for Reflections on Racialisation, Privilege and Whiteness. Nordic Journal of Social Research, 13(1), 94–107. Mnemo ZIN, Gannon, S., & Ylitapio-Mäntylä, O. (2025). Collective Biography in Education Research: Exploring Feminist, Decolonial, Poststructuralist, and Posthumanist Perspectives. In M. Koro & K. Murris, K. (Eds.), Handbook of Reconfiguring Interpretation in (Post)Qualitative Research (193-206). Routledge. Ovens, A., & Tinning, R. (2009). Reflection as situated practice: A memory-work study of lived experience in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25, 1125–1131. Ylitapio-Mäntylä, O., & Mäkiranta, M. (2010). From past to present: Photo-related memory-work and new images in educational practices. In M. Bielecka (Ed.), Tradition and new practices in art education (pp. 119–126). Jan Kochanowski University of Humanities and Sciences.