In this book, teachers from a variety of backgrounds reflect upon their journeys into and within teaching to discuss the impact of their diverse experiences on the ways in which they teach. The authors adopt a variety of autoethnographic approaches in telling stories of transition and profound transformation as they each discuss how certain events in their lives have shaped their professional identities and methods of teaching. In telling their stories they also tell stories of the culture and process of education. This offers the opportunity to consider the narratives as examples of how individuals and groups respond in different ways to institutional and national policies on education. In these chapters, the authors offer illumination from a number of perspectives, of how practitioners of education make meaning of their lives and work in our changing times. By capturing these personal stories, this book will inform and support readers who are studying to become teachers and those already working in education by developing their understanding and empathy with the role. Autoethnography can develop self-knowledge and understanding in the reader and writer of such texts, offering unique insights and individual ways of being that will benefit students and staff in a range of educational settings. This book values the telling and sharing of stories as a strategy for enabling teachers to learn from one another and help them to feel more supported. The book will be useful for teachers and teacher educators, students of education, and all researchers interested in autoethnography and self-narrative.

It is widely recognised that we are living through an 'age of the narrative'. Many of the constituent disciplines in the social sciences resonate with this trend by using life history and narrative approaches and methods. As we move on from the modernist period which prioritised objectivity into the postmodern regard for subjectivity, this resort to narrative is likely to become more apparent and explicit in academic as well as social and commercial discourse. One aspect of this narrative form which is commonly overlooked is that of the pedagogic encounter. This is the phenomenon which is addressed by all narrative and biographical research. Fundamentally reflecting and examining the narrative of our lives in the process of learning, this book provides a series of studies and guidelines for what we have termed 'narrative pedagogy.' It presents a resource for an exploration of those narrative processes that can lead to meaningful change and development for individuals and groups within a learning environment and in life-learning. This focus on life history allows us to identify and support routes to learning within the narrative landscape of learners and through these pedagogic encounters.

Autoethnography, Self-Narrative and Teacher Education examines the professional life and work of teacher educators. In adopting an autoethnographic and life-history approach, Mike Hayler develops a theoretically informed discussion of how the professional identity of teacher educators is both formed and represented by narratives of experience. The book draws upon analytic autoethnography and life-history methods to explore the ways in which teacher educators construct and develop their conceptions and practice by engaging with memory through narrative, in order to negotiate some of the ambivalences and uncertainties of their work. The author’s own story of learning, embedded within the text, was shared with other teacher-educators, who following interviews wrote self-narratives around themes which emerged from discussion. The focus for analysis develops from how professional identity and pedagogy are influenced by changing perceptions and self-narratives of life and work experiences, and how this may influence professional culture, content and practice in this area. The book includes an evaluation of how using this approach has allowed the author to investigate both the subject and method of the research with implications for educational research and the practice of teacher education. Audience: Scholars and students of education and the education of teachers, researchers interested in autoethnography and self-narrative.

This dissertation identifies questions of difficulty in teaching and represents one story of an enduring poststructural reconstitution of the relational fields of self, theory, and practice. The first three sections are self-authored narratives (Coming to Teaching: Notes to the Reader; Coming to Difficulty: Returning of Life to Its Original Difficulty; Coming to Wisdom in Teaching through Narrative). Some narratives are memories of originary, often preconceptual, difficulty in which I retrace and reunderstand my own epistemologies. Some narratives are deliberate products of literary fictive craft, meant to create openings for more study, multiple tellings, and diverse interpretations, as with any piece of good literature. Other narratives, exploring complexities of the underside of teaching, are "counter-narratives" (Giroux, Lankshear, McLaren, & Peters, 1996) which the teaching community of readers may find difficult to accept or know and prefer to leave untold. Each narrative necessarily has its roots in some form of autobiography, although several blossom into fiction for reasons of ethics, poetics, and creative possibility. These narratives serve as force-field containers (in the Greek sense of temenos or crucible) which textually hold still the shards and images of difficulty long enough to apprehend, examine, comprehend, and further imagine the site of self, with the salutary effect of re-understanding and reconstituting that self in teaching. The final section (Teacher, Teach Thyself: Lessons from Difficulty) is a descriptive contemplation of the process and effect of researching the curriculum of the (teaching) self. Researching inductively through multiple writings, readings, and interpretations of narratives about (self) difficulty, seven significant relational, holographic orbitals of work emerge: naive storying, psychological construction, psychotherapeutic ethics, narrative craft, hermeneutic philosophy, curriculum pedagogy, and poetics of a teaching self. Entire education systems are in deep difficulty, but I believe I have the right and ability only to govern and alter myself, to ethinarratively reconstitute my own relational praxis, to be able to work with others at the center of difficulty with a durable, intelligent, wise, humble, generative, compassionate field of self capable of laughter, hope, goodness, truth, meaning and beauty in Being at the close of this darkening twentieth century. Such hermeneutic narrative research makes it possible to be ethically responsible for personal shadow, practices of unhealthy transference, and impulses to control or colonize other, in order to teach in meaningful, present, educative engagements with students learning and constructing their own life narratives.

"In this volume, chapter authors successfully challenge readers to think about narrative research in its own context while also maintaining original, personal voices that underscore the value this field places on an individual's communication of his or her experience. By revealing their struggles with qualitative research's emerging and evolving processes and their experiences working with students at various educational levels, these authors subtly, but effectively, arm teachers with tools that anticipate common pitfalls and frustrations. At the same time, the authors relate professional triumphs that illustrate effective teaching - and doing - of narrative research."--BOOK JACKET.

Storytelling--or narrative--is gaining acceptance as an important tool for professional development, research, and teaching. This book shows how teachers and educators can use stories of their professional experiences to reflect on their own practice, articulate values and beliefs, give shape and form to teaching theory, and better understand decision-making processes. The book offers strategies for generating, sharing, and using narrativeand illustrates its points with many rich classroom stories.Individual chapters built around specific themes show how teachers use narrative to forge connections, learn from students, reflect upon experience, resolve conflict, develop as professionals, and enter the educational dialogue. A wealth of examples and specific suggestions show teachers at all levels, preschool through high school, how to compose and give voice to their own stories, forcing them to dig beneath the surface, think more deeply about teaching and learning, and become truly reflective practitioners.

Recent writing on education and social change, and a growing number of new governmental initiatives across Western societies have proceeded in denial or ignorance of the personal missions and biographical trajectories of key public sector personnel. This book stems from an underpinning belief that we have to understand the personal biographical if we are to understand the fate of social and political initiatives. In education a pattern has emerged in many countries around the world. Each new government enshrines targets and tests to ensure that teachers at the frontline delivery are ‘more accountable’. Whilst this often provides evidence of symbolic action to the electorate or professional audiences, the evidence at the level of service delivery is often far less impressive. Targets, tests and tables may win wide support from the public, but there are often negligible or even contradictory effects at the point of delivery, enforced by the ignorance or denial of personal missions and biographical mandates. This book locates most of its analysis and discussion at the point of culture clash between centralised dictates, and individual and collective life missions. Whilst the early part of the book considers a range of issues related to school curriculum, the focus on the biographical and life narrative becomes increasingly important as the analysis proceeds. Curriculum, Personal Narrative and the Social Future will be of key interest to practising teachers, educational researchers and students on teacher training courses, postgraduate courses and doctoral courses.