Karen Leigh McComas

Images from DSI2005

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All teachers who enter:
Be prepared to tell your story.

Education has become a complex business. Layer upon layer of administrative regulations and requirements serve as wedges, separating us from who we are at our very core. We are teachers - the people who have the power and the position to directly influence future generations and ultimately the course of the world. One of us teaches the 49th President of the United States. One of us teaches a future pope. One of us teaches the doctor who will discover a cure for AIDS.

In Researching Teaching: Exploring Teacher Development through Reflexive Inquiry, Ardra Cole and J. Gary Knowles write:

Who we are and come to be as teachers and teacher-educators is a reflection of a complex, ongoing process of interaction and interpretation of elements, conditions, opportunities, and events that take place throughout our lives in all realms of our existence - the intellectual, physical, psychological, spiritual, political, and social. For us, making sense of prior and current life experiences in the context of the personal as it influences the "professional" is the essence of professional development. Thus we situate professional inquiry in the context of personal histories.

Because what we do is so critically important to the future of the world and because who we are is so critically important to what we do, we must take the time to discover, and tell, our stories. This Digital Story Institute provides that opportunity. Here we begin, or continue, to understand who we are as teachers - as people. Here we tell our stories.

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Images from DSI2005