Contextual conflicts in educators’ personal experience narratives

This paper describes and analyzes how context acts as a resource for and a constraint upon the personal experience narratives educators tell. Since personal experience narrative is both a form of oral literature and a sociolinguistic event, a narrator is obligated to attend to both the poetic demands of telling a good story and the demands of context. Through a detailed case study of a personal experience narrative, told in the culturally defined scene of a teacher study group, the author demonstrates how the powerful subtleties context can undermine educators’ personal experience narration.