ABSTRACT
Our interviews with teacher candidates were set up to document the ways in which they had used the family story backpacks to encourage families to share stories about their funds of knowledge with each other and with teachers. The stories that we hoped to hear from teacher candidates were not the stories that we were told. Despite the negative responses, we did not want to abandon the backpack engagement. The stories from teacher candidates instead compelled us to identify changes that needed to be made in the engagement and in our teaching and program. This experience convinced us that we need to create spaces as teacher educators to hear our students’ stories about their experiences and to use those stories as the basis for transforming our teaching. Over time, what began as a research strategy became
an important tool in growing our understandings as teacher educators. This chapter documents how the stories of teacher candidates informed our work with the family story backpacks over a three-year period.
