2026 Theses Doctoral

The Care of the Student: Humanizing English Teacher Education by Learning from Narrative Medicine

Sitzer, Patrick M.

This dissertation explores the ways English teacher education can learn from methods adapted from the field of narrative medicine. Established within a theoretical framework of dialogical self theory and transaction theories of reading, this narrative inquiry examines the questions of what happens to a teacher’s changing sense of professional identity when they record stories of their practice in a parallel chart and share them in a narrative study group and whether these practices can provide novice teachers more humanized support in their first years of teaching.

Three novice English teachers gathered over four months to record and share narratives of their emerging practice as part of a narrative study group facilitated by the researcher. Written narratives and transcripts of conversations were analyzed to explore these teachers’ positionalities and the literary features of their writing. Their results show possibilities for future integration of methods from narrative medicine into English teacher education for the benefit of novice teachers and teacher educators alike.