Writing for wellness: storytelling, care, and reflection in teacher education

In the face of the traumas of a global pandemic, it became pertinent for teacher training programmes and educators like me to be intentional about practices that foreground a pedagogy of care with a focus on wellness and healing, courageous conversations and what Price-Dennis and Sealey-Ruiz (2021) has described as critical love. What does it mean to be a justice-oriented educator? How can we learn to have brave conversations in the classroom? How does writing and storytelling play into this? In this article, I will seek to show how I used writing and storytelling as a pedagogy and practice of care and critical love in my work with elementary education pre-service teachers. I will define and provide a comprehensive summary of these writing and storytelling practices. I use the term storytelling as an overarching theme that connects various reflective practices.