A Continuum of Learning: Enhancing Connections Between Teacher Candidates and Graduate Students in Education Through a Narrative Framework

This paper was written to complement the book review; "What's Your Story? A Book Review of Leah Fowler's A Curriculum of Difficulty: Narrative Research in Education and the Practice of Teaching" (2006), which can also be found in this issue of in education. This paper challenges teacher-education professionals to consider the benefits of creating and facilitating meaningful mentorship opportunities between teacher-candidates and education graduate students. This paper discusses Fowler's (2006) model for narrative inquiry and its relationship to the formation of teacher identity and explores whether or not this particular model can support the creation of sustainable and effective mentoring relationships in current teacher-education programs. Teacher-candidates and graduate students alike will both come to a "deeper understanding of the relationship among past, present, and projected senses of self" (Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 1996) as they engage in mutually beneficial, critically reflective learning practices. Purposeful construction of mentorship opportunities that honour the experiential stories of individuals may serve to further increase education students' awareness of their dynamic position along a continuum of learning in both undergraduate and graduate contexts.