Everybody has a story: storytelling as a community building exploration of equity and access

Utilizing the voices of students in an undergraduate teacher preparation program, this article describes the use of a collaborative storytelling experience. Situated within the context of cooperative base groups, this collaborative storytelling has been designed to help pre-service teachers examine their own experiences in school in an effort to broaden their perspectives and begin to understand the classroom as a complex social and cultural system. The storytelling serves as a foundation for learning the knowledge and skills and acquiring the dispositions necessary to utilize cooperative learning as a core pedagogical orientation.