Voices of Early Career Teachers: Mentorship Through the Comics

In this chapter we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of comics as a vehicle for presenting teachers' stories of challenge and professional growth. Comics have the potential to illustrate, in a light-hearted fashion, narratives from early career teachers on the subject of professional practice in British Columbia, Canada. Printed copies of the comic booklets are widely shared among the educational communities in British Columbia, as well as through national and international conference venues. Through comics, we offer teachers an imaginative insight into new teachers’ stories, inviting them to reflect on their own experience of becoming teachers, to engage in conversation around educational issues, and to articulate the complexity of pedagogical relationships among teachers and their professional learning communities.

This series of comics is part of the body of work from a research project entitled: Pedagogical Assemblage: Building and Sustaining Teacher Capacity through Mentoring Programs in British Columbia (2014-2017). This research builds on the New Teacher Mentoring Project (NTMP) that brings together the Teacher Education Office (TEO) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the British Columbia Ministry of Education, the British Columbia School Superintendents’ Association (BCSSA), and the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) to address the need for promoting, building and sustaining a professional culture of collaboration through teacher mentoring in the context of the British Columbia K-12 public education system.
For more information, visit mentoringbc.ca