Cultivating Care, Wellbeing, and Reflection in Teacher Education : Stories That Teach

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.