Cultivating Care, Wellbeing, and Reflection in Teacher Education Stories That Teach

1. Chapter Storytelling as a Methodology of Care: Theoretical Foundations for Literacy and Wellbeing  Pause: My Name  2. What’s in a Name Revisited: Relationships, Reflections, and Becoming Teachers  Pause: Sand Ice-cream Memories  3. Practicing Wellness through Embodied Literacies  Pause: Love Is a Sight Word: A Found Poem  4. Reading as Response: Connecting Literature to Lived Experience  Pause: Anya  5. Grief Literacy: Writing as Witness  Pause: Pages  6. From Emotion to Need: Contemplative Writing and Nonviolent Communication  Pause: A Note from Prison  7. Objects of the Heart: Telling Stories through Artifactual Literacy  Pause: The Teacher the Mirror  8. Acting Out: Exploring Performed Language and Problem-Solving through Role-Play  Pause: Language as River  9. Rivers of Language: Stories in an AI World  Pause: Found Poems in the Voice of Bilingual 7-year-old  10. Data and Assessment as Storytelling: Multilingual Stories  Pause: My Mother Tongue Has an Accent  11. Beyond Binaries: Teaching with Intention  Pause  12. Towards a Pedagogy of Listening with Compassion  Coda: Stories That Don't Translate

Biography

Kinga Varga-Dobai is Professor of Language and Literacy in the School of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College.

"Kinga Varga-Dobai has given us a gift that feels like a soft and worn hand-stitched quilt passed down from a great-grandmother. Immersing readers in tender stories about her life and stories from her teacher education students that shake loose dominant stereotypes of education majors in the United States, Kinga moves the needle for literacy education to wellness and wholeness: the uniting of spirit, body, and mind. Readers will soften under Kinga’s storytelling methodology and make plans to incorporate her storytelling practices with their own teacher education students. They will also expand and sharpen their analytical tools, learning from Kinga's incisive feminist critiques of the frameworks available to make sense of power and oppression in the United States. Do yourself a favor - settle in with this book and begin to imagine the pedagogies necessary to live and heal in an uncertain and tumultuous world." 
- Stephanie Jones, The University of Georgia, Meigs Distinguished Professor, Mary Frances Early College of Education, USA

"Kinga Varga-Dobai’s Storytelling, Wellbeing, and Teacher Education names the gaps and meets the longings in my education as a teacher, professor. Centering storytelling as an embodied praxis that centers care within and as relation, she dismantles the stubborn, unrelenting, and often unconscious binaries that lodge themselves into educational structures aligned with power. Her insightful analyses and theorizing are accompanied by and interdependent with stories from her own sites of learning. In the Pause, her engaged storytelling breathes into what she offers, inviting a collective disentanglement from power and oriented toward education’s potential for learning and liberation. Storytelling, Wellbeing, and Teacher Education is essential reading." 
- Kimberlee Pérez, Editor, Text & Performance Quarterly; Associate Professor of Performance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

"This book offers a rigorous and theoretically grounded examination of storytelling as an embodied methodology for advancing teacher wellbeing, intercultural competence, and reflective pedagogical practice. Drawing on feminist, narrative, and literacy scholarship, it demonstrates how narrative inquiry can disrupt reductive binaries, cultivate relational ways of knowing, and support humane, equity‑oriented teacher education. It constitutes a much‑needed contribution to contemporary debates in literacy education and teacher preparation at a time when the role of teachers is more important than ever.
- Andrea Pető, Professor, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

This book is a deeply humanizing and intellectually rigorous contribution to literacy and teacher education. Through use of storytelling as a feminist poststructuralist methodology of care, Kinga Varga-Dobai bridges theory and practice to show how her pedagogy elicits complex emotions, identities, and relational knowing in her students and self.  Her mosaic of beautifully crafted stories and theoretical provocations is an essential read for teacher educators, literacy scholars, and practitioners committed to crafting culturally sustaining teaching with an open heart."
- Ruth Harman, The University of Georgia, Professor, TESOL and World Language Education, Mary Frances Early College of Education, USA