Abstract:

In teacher education, storytelling is often positioned as a reflective exercise rather than as a method of knowledge-making. Yet in many traditions, stories function as pedagogies - ways of transmitting memory, ethics, and relational knowledge across generations. This paper explores the use of story circles and embodied learning as pedagogical practices within a Foundation Phase teacher education programme, while also interrogating how gender operates within the curriculum and within the teaching profession itself.

The paper is a self-reflective inquiry into a teaching practice in which stories are used as a collective method for thinking about childhood, memory, care, and classroom experience. In these sessions, preservice teachers are invited to share and listen to stories about schooling, language, gendered expectations, and experiences of learning. These stories are not only spoken; they are also embodied through gesture, movement, and performative enactment, drawing on principles of embodied learning. Embodied learning integrates the body into the learning process through movement and sensory engagement, recognising that cognition is grounded in lived, physical experience. By unsettling the traditional mind–body divide, embodied approaches open possibilities for understanding teaching as relational, affective, and situated in everyday practice.

Through narrative reflection and classroom observation, the paper considers how story circles function as both method and metaphor in teacher training. They create spaces where preservice teachers can examine their own schooling histories while reflecting on how gendered assumptions shape ideas of care, authority, and pedagogy in the Foundation Phase classroom. In doing so, the practice invites students to recognise teaching not only as technical practice but as relational and embodied labour. The paper contributes to conversations about enhancing the undergraduate experience in teacher education by demonstrating how arts-informed, embodied, and gender-conscious pedagogies can cultivate reflective educators capable of engaging critically with the social and relational dimensions of early childhood teaching.

Keywords:

Embodied Learning, Story Circles, Teacher Education, Arts-Based Pedagogy, Reflective Practice.