Looking for a Good Teacher : A Story of a Personal Journey

Humans make sense of experience through narrative and stories. ?Narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, our experience, and ultimately ourselves? (Kerby, 1991, p. 3). Story enlarges our capacity to understand our actions and our values and lets us talk about them (Novak, 1978, p. 63). Story is a ?mode of thinking and feeling? that facilitates people?s ability to ?create a version of the world in which, psychologically, they can envisage a place for themselves?a personal world? (Bruner, 1996, p. 39). It is also vital to the realization of that world. This study is a storyteller-teacher-researcher?s personal quest to find a good teacher. The stories are my looking. I am telling a story of looking for a good teacher that implicitly demonstrates how narratives facilitate a deeper understanding of good teaching. I pursue the quest simultaneously in three realms that blend with, enrich, and enlarge each other: recovering from illness, journeying around the world, and reflecting on teaching practice. The stories in this work are showing the capacity of narrative imagining in human experience. Through the stories re-presented here, I made discoveries that are very important to being a good teacher. Yet those discoveries cast a shadow across something else that is necessary to being a good teacher and kept it hidden from my view. It was not until I had almost completed the storying process of telling, reflecting, and discovering that the shadow receded and that which is so integral to being a good teacher was revealed