Small stories in online classroom discussion as resources for preservice teachers’ making sense of becoming a bilingual educator

This paper examines the occurrence and role of personal and professional stories, called small stories or narratives-in-interaction, shared among seven bilingual preservice teachers in nine online classroom discussions in a teacher preparation course. Grounded in qualitative and discourse analytic methods, findings indicated that narratives-in-interaction helped the participants make sense of becoming bilingual educators. Small stories acted to connect academic knowledge to teaching experiences, inviting diverse aspects of the participants’ teaching self across time and personal and professional lives. Affordances of the online platform encouraged the use of small stories as a social practice for professional development as bilingual educators.