"Narrative Pedagogy Under Scrutiny: Towards Developing Teachers' Pedagogical Competence Through Stories" Harry Potter as a Case Study

Abstract

Upon contemplating J.K Rowling’s words “no story lives unless someone wants to listen…. The stories we love best do live in us forever.” (Rowling, 2011, 2:55) one realizes that most of our current knowledge is the product of social interaction, and most importantly of sharing stories of personal experience through which one learns and teaches, a stimulus for intellectual and social growth; so why can't a teacher also learn from the experiences of other teachers? This study aims to experiment with narrative pedagogy on teachers' process of pedagogy-acquisition through fictional experiential narratives, and to investigate the prospect of expanding and appropriating the use of this approach in the field of education. A qualitative inquiry was conducted through two main phases. First, through personal application of narrative pedagogy on the Harry Potter fictional books by using thematic analysis to explore the different existing pedagogical practices in the story and creating themes that were used in the second phase of the research which consisted of an experiment carried out through interviews on a sample of EFL teachers and Master 2 didactics students, to determine their attitudes towards the use of narrative pedagogy on fiction for acquiring pedagogical knowledge, the attitudes in question were hypothesized to be positive. The analysis and discussion of the findings resulted in a confirmation of the hypothesis and opened the door to a new prospect for the educational institution to develop, prosper and reach towards a brighter future.