Story exchange in teacher professional discourse Aliza Segal Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel highlights  Embedded stories in teacher professional discourse are studied using mixed methods.  Three analytic lenses are concurrently brought to bear: identity, representation, and argumentation.  Stories appear in story clusters, and association is found between stories' framing and subsequent uptake.  Storytelling genre facilitates expressions of heterodox views, but teachers then retreat to consensus.  Implications for teacher learning are discussed. article info Article history: Received 3 May 2018 Received in revised form 29 May 2019 Accepted 19 August 2019 Available online xxx Teacher stories have been investigated primarily as modes for representing practice (e.g. Horn, 2010; Horn & Little, 2010) or as means of eliciting or negotiating identities (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2001). Building on sociolinguistic research on embedded “small stories” (e.g. Georgakopoulou, 2006; Ochs, 2004), and recent studies of naturally occurring teacher stories (e.g. Downey, 2015; Pulvermacher & Lefstein, 2016), this paper brings together these and additional lenses to explore key functions of embedded teacher stories. In a case study comprised of quantitative analysis of 18 meetings of one teacher team and micro- analysis of select episodes (including the focal episode in this article), I show how stories function as a communicative tool in teacher discourse, and explore ways in which they are taken up by the group to understand the affordances and constraints of story exchange for teacher learning. The lenses of identity, representa- tion, and pedagogical reasoning e typically used in theoretical and empirical isolation from one another e are thus brought together to shed light on this prevalent discursive genre. 1. Narrative research The field of narrative research in education has long been dominated by big stories, elicited or constructed by researchers. In the introduction to her work reflecting on 20 years of narrative research into teachers' lives, Elbaz-Luwisch (2006) offers the rationale for this line of inquiry. Narrative, or story, is conceived as a “methodology for understanding the lives and work of teachers,” and such research “makes it possible to pay attention to the wider concerns that shape the work of teaching, looking at the whole lives of teachers … and exploring those lives as embedded in multiple contexts” (p. x). It enables teachers to give voice to “practical knowledge” and engage in “processes of restorying practice” (p. xii). This restorying, or “narrativization,” is conceived as “involving meaning making, ordering and structuring of the experience” (Georgakopoulou, 2006, p. 236). Whether produced written or orally, in cooperation with or analyzed after the fact by the researcher, stories are probed for overarching understandings of teacher knowledge, world views, and, predominantly, identity. They are viewed as relatively stable across contexts and therefore subject to analysis as “textual product, abstracted from the context of its production and performance” (Pulvermacher & Lefstein, 2016, p. 256). In contrast, contextually situated, spontaneous, embedded stories have received attention in sociolinguistic research under the heading small stories, which are small in their brevity and in their attention to the fleeting moments of micro-interaction (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008). While some educational researchers have used the term “small stories” to denote elicited local stories, as opposed to elicited grand canonical or policy narratives (e.g. Olson & Craig, 2009; Schultz & Ravitch, 2013), I follow Bamberg and Georgakopoulou in focusing specifically upon interactionally embedded stories. One way of understanding the difference between big and small stories is through five dimensions identified by Ochs and Capps (2001): tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity, and moral stance. Each of these dimensions represents a continuum of E-mail address: alizas@bgu.ac.il. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.102913 0742-051X/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102913