Narrative Inquiries Into Being and Becoming Educators

Narrative Inquiries Into Being and Becoming Educators: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives provides stories and narratives of the struggle and strengths of the teachers within the educational landscape. Keeping the temporal perspective wide, the chapters are situated across history, from 1700 to the present and through a variety of perspectives or lenses. This approach aligns with the three dimensions of narrative inquiry: the personal and social (interaction); the past, present, and future (continuity); and place or situation. Each chapter takes a unique positioning across time and situation, illuminating the personal and social interactions while using narratives as data to inquire into “becoming” a teacher. Most importantly, this book unpacks diverse experiences of teachers from the past and present, and it is critically important to understanding the emergence of teachers’ identities or “stories to live by” expressed in narrative terms. Each of the featured authors evidenced this through serial interpretation, and broadening and burrowing to construct meaning.

Teacher education is inextricably linked to teachers’ lives, and narrative inquiry studies lives in motion. Therefore, each of these chapters employs narrative inquiry as the research method or a way of thinking to explore how educators’ unique teaching experience and perspective impacted the educational landscape. The book looks at the art and science of “becoming” a teacher, not just from the temporal perspective of pre-service education, but from a holistic view of becoming throughout the storied life of a teacher. The contributors to this book understand that narrative inquiry is a rich and complex method that allows them to explore the meanings that participants derived from their experiences, and to catch the voices that may have otherwise remained silent.

This book acts as a compass for navigating the seas of narrative inquiry approaches and makes important knowledge contributions to the local, national, and international research base on teaching and teacher education.