Teaching That Is Grounded in Inquiry
Supporting, Sharing, and Sustaining Teacher Inquiry
By showcasing the inquiry stories of Goeson, Sullivan, and other talented practitioner inquirers, Voices of Practitioners has provided a forum for these educators to share their personal, communal, and professional talents with a larger audience. However, this collection also shows that making one’ s inquiry public is not enough. The inquiry must address critical elements of human identity and learning for children and adults, and it must be rendered through well-told stories, cogent reflections, and meaningful implications for teaching and learning. These key factors sustain teacher inquiry and teacher research as living practices that nurture understanding, belonging, and joy for children and the educators who learn alongside them, as illustrated in the reflection below.
A Way of Knowing, A Way of Transforming Practice
By Andrew J. Stremmel
The stories highlighted in this article underscore that teacher research must stem from and remain grounded in classrooms, communities, and the complex identities teachers bring to their work. Teacher researchers take ownership of their backgrounds and experiences, following children into investigations that uncover questions of equity, belonging, power, development, and learning.
Building on this vision of teacher research as a relational and equitable practice, I offer a reflection that explores how narrative inquiry deepens teachers’ understanding of what it means to know, to teach, and to learn.
Teaching That Is Grounded in Inquiry
I believe that the first and immediate goal is to help teachers get better at what they do. The second aim is for teachers to gain a better understanding of themselves as teachers, their children as learners, and the context in which teaching and learning are immersed. This better understanding is in some ways comparable to the generation of knowledge. But the knowledge a teacher creates is located spatially and temporally, and it can be shared with others as stories or other forms of narrative.
Bruner( 1986) notes that telling stories( narratives) is one of the most important features of teaching, and it is a valid and important way to share knowledge. Teachers engaged in narrative inquiry regularly write and author stories to describe the events of their settings and, more importantly, to interpret, make sense of, and address the issues and problems they encounter there. This narrative way of knowing creates storied understandings that cannot be captured via traditional research, which some have argued pursues the wrong questions
96 Young Children
Spring 2026