Narrative Approaches to Exploring Language,Identity and Power in Language Teacher Education

Introduction

The quotation above contains a number of keywords which represent the major, interrelated topics covered in this article. The first of these is identity. The article describes a view of identity as fluid, constructed and negotiated in different contexts, and thus multiple. Three words represent this perspective: sometimes, which refers to the temporal, changeable character of identity, situation, which refers to the context in which identities are negotiated and constructed, and the word negotiate itself.

Negotiation comes into play in situations of inequality. As Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004: 3) say, negotiation ‘may take place between individuals, between majority and minority groups, and, most importantly, between institutions and those they are supposed to serve’. Inequality means that some people, groups and institutions have more power than others, but those with less power do not always accept the positions they find themselves in. And so another important word in the quotation is confrontational. This signals the often conflictual nature of identity negotiation in situations where unequal power relations are evident.

How does language relate to identity and power? Bourdieu (1977: 652) says that ‘language is worth what those who speak it are worth’. Who we are (our identities) is inextricably linked to the languages we know and use. But languages and people cannot in themselves have power; it is in discursive interactions between people and between people and institutions (i.e. language as a social practice) that relations of power become evident and the negotiation of identities takes place. These discursive interactions have been theoretically framed in different ways by researchers; for example, some refer to people positioning themselves during social interaction (Bamberg, 1997), others see the identification processes as performance (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005) and others suggest that it is through narrative, i.e. through the (co)telling of stories, that identities are constructed (Rugen, 2013).

This article examines the complex interrelationship between identity, language and power, and it makes the case for a narrative approach to understanding this interrelationship. I present and analyse two narratives, one a full entry from a teacher journal written by an in-service teacher as part of a graduate course assignment, and the other an excerpt, which I call a ‘short story’, from an interview with a high school ESL teacher. The first narrative is analysed according to a typical content or thematic analysis approach, an approach commonly used by student teachers in teacher education programs (see Johnson and Golombek, 2011). The second narrative, the short story, is also analysed for content, but this time I introduce an approach which encourages a more systematic in-depth analysis of narrative dimensions and the varying scales of context in which the stories are lived and told.

In the next section I provide a rationale for exploring the concept of teacher identity in language teacher education (see Pennington and Richards, this issue). I then provide a brief overview of narrative inquiry. In the section after that I attempt to show how narrative inquiry relates to identity, and do so in the form of a broad description or definition of identity (from Norton, 2013). In the latter part of the article I analyse the two narratives; the teacher journal entry and the short story from the high school teacher interview. I end by commenting on the relevance of narrative identity research to language teacher education.

Identity in Language Teaching

Before addressing definitions of identity and the various perspectives taken in identity research, we should first ask why the study of identity and an awareness of identity issues are important for language teachers. Why has there recently been such an accelerated interest in things to do with identity? What purpose is served by exploring and by being aware of teacher identity?

In some classrooms teachers follow a syllabus which may be prescribed by departments, institutions or even governments. They use certain approaches to teaching, such as communicative language teaching or task-based language teaching, and they assess their learners according to the requirements of the syllabus (i.e. they test what has been taught). In other classrooms teachers have more flexibility to choose the content of what they teach and to design their own teaching and assessment materials. In both cases, and in the many other possible classroom teaching arrangements, teachers are not merely technicians who carry out their work without thinking about what they do. Over the years, the study of language teaching and teacher education has acknowledged this, and the current focus on teacher cognitions (i.e. their thinking, beliefs, attitudes, and decision-making) is evidence of this shift (see Borg, 2006). Teachers, however, are not only cognitive beings, they are also social beings. Inside their classrooms they interact with their learners, they develop relationships with them, and together they construct sociocultural worlds in which they live their teacher and learner lives together. Outside their classrooms teachers engage with other teachers, other learners, and with administrators in their schools. And even further afield, they are members of many other communities, personal and professional, local and global. Teachers perceived as thinking and social people, then, are not merely implementers of a syllabus or instructors of a linguistic skill like robots in a factory. It follows, therefore, that

in order to understand language teaching and learning we need to understand teachers; and in order to understand teachers, we need to have a clearer sense of who they are; the professional, cultural, political, and individual identities which they claim or which are assigned to them (Varghese et al., 2005: 22).

Researchers have focused their work on a number of teacher identity issues, and their findings have important implications for curriculum design, classroom practice, and teacher education programmes. For example, one significant area of interest has been ‘non-native speaker’ teachers of English and their comparison with ‘native speaker’ teachers. Labels such as these are problematic when used to signify and essentialize the ethnicity of language learners. They are no less problematic when used to reference language teacher identities. Of particular concern has been the naming (or labelling) of ‘non-native speaker’ teachers, their status in schools and the profession, and their classroom practices. Some of the key questions asked about them, especially in comparison with ‘native speaker’ teachers, include: Who are they? What should they be called? What do they call themselves? In what parts of the world do they teach, and under what conditions? How do they feel about being ‘non-native speaker’ teachers? How are they perceived by ‘native speaker’ teachers? How are they perceived by (their) language learners? How are they perceived by (potential) employers? How do they see themselves? How do their classroom practices differ from those of ‘native speaker’ teachers? What advantages do they have over ‘native speaker’ teachers?

Just as researchers are interested in studying and learning about teacher identities, so too are teachers. Writing about teacher professional identities, Watson (2006: 510) reminds us that ‘who we think we are influences what we do’. Consequently, teachers have been encouraged to reflect on their practice at the various stages of their careers in order to discover who they think they are (Farrell, 2015). Pre-service teachers, for instance, often participate in reflective activity, such as writing journals about their teaching practicum experiences. In some cases, these are shared with other pre-service teachers or with their teacher educators and a dialogue may follow. Typically some sort of analysis of the journal entries also takes place. In my own in-service graduate classes, teachers write narratives of their teaching and language learning experiences. These are analysed for the purposes of reflection and course assessment. Teachers who are not participants in formal professional development programmes have also been encouraged not only to reflect on their own practice (i.e. to be reflective practitioners), but also to engage in what is called teacher research (Borg, 2013) i.e. to systematically investigate, either independently or in collaboration with other teachers or researchers, aspects of their professional lives, often in the form of action research projects. The purpose of these reflective and research activities is for teachers to explore and to understand their ongoing identity (re)construction, at all stages of their careers. As MacLure (1993: 311) explains, they are a ‘resource that people use to explain, justify and make sense of themselves in relation to others, and to the world at large’. And what teachers know about themselves – their personal histories, their ideologies, their language use, the kind of person they are, how others perceive them – affects their professional practice and their understanding of the power relationships that exist among themselves, their learners and members of the wider community.

Narrative Inquiry

Narrative inquiry is a way of doing research that focuses on the stories we tell about our lives. These stories are about our experiences of life; the meaning we make of the events we live or imagine in our future lives. Kramp (2004: 107) says that stories ‘assist humans to make life experiences meaningful. Stories preserve our memories, prompt our reflections, connect us to our past and present, and assist us to envision our future’. In other words, stories are not merely a list of facts about the things we do, the people we do them with, where and when we do them, they also embody our understandings of those events as well as express our feelings about them. Experiences become narratives when we tell them to an audience and narratives become part of narrative inquiry when they are examined for research purposes or generated to report the findings of an inquiry.

A narrative turn in recent years has meant that in TESOL and applied linguistics researchers have begun to understand the importance of paying attention to how language teachers and learners use stories to make sense of their experience. Researchers learn about these experiences from the participants’ own perspectives. Barkhuizen, Benson and Chik (2014), more specifically, suggest four explanations for this narrative turn. First, narrative inquiry has an intuitive appeal to researchers who have ‘become weary of variables and the quantification of the positivistic approach’ (Josselson, 1993: xv). It is thus part of a broader turn towards qualitative research and away from the assumption that psychological, social and educational phenomena should be investigated in much the same way that scientists investigate natural phenomena. Second, interest in narratives reflects postmodern concerns with the self, identity and individuality, signalling a turn away from the quest for general social theories that would enable social scientists to predict human behaviour. Third, a related explanation is the importance that narrative has acquired as a resource that individuals draw upon in the construction of their identities. The stories they tell help researchers understand the ways in which they situate themselves and their activities in the world. Lastly, Barkhuizen et al., (2014) point out that an interest in narrative has been linked to a turn towards the idea that research should both involve and empower the people whose experiences are the subject of research. Narrative inquiry expands the range of voices that are heard in research reports, often highlighting the experiences of marginalized groups (Hayes, 2013).

Various methods for collecting and analysing data and for reporting the findings of research are associated with the process of what I call narrative knowledging (Barkhuizen, 2011: 395), which is ‘the meaning making, learning, or knowledge construction that takes place during the narrative research activities of (co)constructing narratives, analyzing narratives, reporting the findings, and reading/watching/listening to research reports’. As this definition implies, different participants engage in narrative knowledging at various mutually informing stages of the research process, including (co)narrators (which could include the researcher), researchers, and consumers of research reports. From this wide range of research methods associated with narrative inquiry (see Barkhuizen, 2015), I choose two types of analysis to illustrate below – a thematic analysis and a short story analysis – because these, I believe, are feasible for teacher reflection and research. But first, I explore in more detail the concept of identity and its relationship with narrative.

Identity and Narrative Inquiry

So far in this article I have not attempted a definition of identity, though I have begun to show how it relates to narrative and storytelling. In this section, some of the comments made already about identity are recapped within the context of a discussion of Norton’s (2013) summary description of identity. Pulling these points together will serve as an extended definition of identity. And this is probably the best approach, since identity is a notoriously difficult concept to define. One reason is that theoretical perspectives have changed over time reflecting changing philosophical trends in the social and human sciences. Also, researchers working in different disciplines (e.g. education, second language acquisition, psychology) have varying ideas about how identity should be conceptualized and operationalized in their work. In spite of the challenges of coming up with a definition of identity, Norton’s (2013) description is a very clear and useful summary of recent poststructuralist thinking about identity, and it has much in common with narrative interpretations of identity; i.e. how identities are constructed in narrative and how narrative researchers approach the study of identity. I have underlined a few phrases (1-6) which are discussed below the extract.

I use the term identity to reference how a person understands his or her relationship to the world,¹ how that relationship is constructed across time and space,² and how the person understands possibilities for the future.³ I argue that SLA [second language acquisition] theory needs to develop a conception of identity that is understood with reference to larger, and frequently inequitable, social structures⁴ which are reproduced in day-to-day social interaction.⁵ In taking this position, I foreground the role of language as constitutive of and constituted by⁶ a language learner’s identity. … It is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and across different sites at different points in time (Norton, 2013: 45).

Narrative One: Teacher Journal Entry

Roxanne is an English teacher at university level in New Zealand. She embarked on a graduate programme to enhance her teaching qualifications. The programme consisted of numerous courses and a research dissertation. In one of her classes, which I taught, she was required to write a series of personal narratives in which she reflected on her teaching experiences in relation to what was being covered in the course (on sociolinguistics and language teaching). The narratives were analysed by the students, using a general thematic analytical approach, as part of the course assessment. Polkinghorne’s (1995) distinction between analysis of narratives and narrative analysis is useful for conceptualizing different approaches to both analysing and reporting narrative data. These two approaches correspond to the two ways of knowing (i.e. two kinds of cognition or ways of organizing experience) described by Bruner (1986). One of these Bruner called paradigmatic cognition, which entails ‘classifying a particular instance as belonging to a category or concept’ (Polkinghorne, 1995: 9). Sense is made of the world by looking for similarities among things and then grouping them as members of the same category. Thematic or content analyses (Hayes, 2013; Riessman, 2008) follow the paradigmatic procedures of coding for themes, categorizing these and looking for patterns of association among them. Three main themes are evident in Rozanne’s narrative.

In her narrative (used with permission), Roxanne tells of an incident which occurred in her workplace. The incident was sparked by her superior, the coordinator of her programme, saying to her, ‘Don’t worry about it, baby. It’s all under control’, in response to Roxanne’s question addressed to him concerning an aspect of her work. Roxanne was shocked by his comment, but she did not merely accept or ignore it; she resisted and challenged it, declaring, ‘I am not his Asian baby!’ The narrative illustrates very well how the use of language in interaction, by all participants in the story, and relations of power work together to generate a space for the negotiation of identity. Ethnic and gender identities are perhaps most evident in Roxanne’s narrative, but these cannot be considered separately from her professional, teacher identity. Her story, after all, takes place in a learning/teaching community.

Earlier this year, the manager at work asked me in passing whether I had completed my student reports. This was done in a casual, non-threatening manner; however, I found it quite unusual, considering I had already placed the reports on the coordinator’s desk earlier that morning. Thinking that perhaps the disk was misplaced, I asked the coordinator, whom I shall refer to from now on as the unprofessional bastard (UB), whether he had received the disk I placed on his desk. I made the point of enquiring in a casual, non-threatening manner. Thus, during lunch time when we were casually sitting around having lunch, I asked, “UB, did you get the student reports I put on your desk?”

To my horror and disgust, he replied: “Don’t worry about it, baby. It’s all under control.”

The above comment must be seen in context. Firstly, UB knew I was not joking and I knew very well he was not joking due to his stern facial expression. Secondly, my interaction with UB at work is exactly that – a working relationship. Hence, there was no prior context established which justifies his use of such a personal term – a term which deeply disgusted me because “baby” is loaded with a lot of negative connotations. For me, such a term strongly suggests that whoever is at the receiving end is thought of as helpless, and a thing/object. It disgusted me because it also has a very strong sexual connotation!

Later that afternoon, I was in the photocopy room at work. I tried desperately to focus on my lesson preparation because I did not want my work performance to decline in any way due to sexist language. At some point, UB came into the room. He decided to make small-talk with me and asked me what I did over the weekend. I said that I went to the video shop and borrowed DVDs, but felt angry with the guy at the video shop because he called me “love”, as in “Yes, love?” when I approached the desk to borrow DVDs. UB’s response to me was a bewildered, “Why? I call my wife and daughter, love”.

At this point, I felt very disgusted because I knew UB could not possibly be that stupid or maybe he is? Does he not know that I am hinting at my disapproval of his previous comment? Does he not realize that I am not his wife, or daughter? Why is he placing me in the same category as his “wife?” I was not really angry with the guy at the video shop although I know some women will have zero tolerance to such language. However, the guy at the video shop is not my “superior” at work. Likewise, the social context is different. The guy at the video shop is not a language teacher who perhaps does not know any better. Furthermore, the way he called me “love” was not “creepy” but more casual and “matter-of-factly.” The intention was more “what can I do for you?”, rather than a put down.

I resolved this issue by showing UB that I am not his Asian baby! or any one else’s. The manager, UB and I had a meeting. I came prepared to the meeting. UB’s defense was that he was only joking and that I was “too sensitive”. So, I raised issues of professional communication styles and respect. I also had EVIDENCE. Just weeks earlier, UB left a written message for me, pertaining to a work matter; however, he drew a large love heart on it!!!!!!! At that time, I asked UB about the meaning of the message because it was disgusting and a bit confusing. He proudly told me with a coy smile on his face, like a schoolboy that HE was the one who drew the love heart. I quickly bolted out of his office with feelings of fear and predominantly disgust. However, I kept this piece of paper because I knew that one day I would need it for self-defence. Why had I not done something about this written message before? Who do people usually take seriously, a coordinator or “a teacher”?

During the meeting, UB said that he always treats me with respect. He had such a belligerent, patronizing attitude, so I intervened by holding up the piece of paper with the love heart on it and said, “Is this respect? This is not respect!” I stated that UB does not treat any one else at work with that kind of “respect.” As soon as I held up the piece of paper with the love heart on it, UB was so humiliated and could not deny he wrote the letter or drew the love heart because he had signed the piece of paper. At the end of the meeting he was crying, like a baby, not because he was sorry but because an Asian baby put him in his place!!

I requested to teach in another program with a different coordinator and it is working out wonderfully. UB’s behaviour towards me has changed to one which is a bit more professional. Although this is one of the proudest moments of my life, it has left me a bit cynical, wary and sad because it reinforced for me that sometimes, unfortunately, the only way to negotiate one’s identity to one of basic respect is for the situation to get confrontational, to say the least; basic respect that others take for granted or do not have to fight for.

The storyline in Roxanne’s written narrative is as follows: the manager of the school asks her if she has finished writing the student reports; she knows she has but confirms that all is in order with her coordinator; the coordinator passes the ‘baby’ remark that offends her; she struggled to concentrate on her lesson preparation; later, in the photocopy room, she tells the coordinator about the way the worker in the video shop speaks to her; the coordinator does not realize that Roxanne is commenting on the way that he talks to her; she requests a meeting with the coordinator and the manager of the school to discuss the issues raised by the coordinator’s communication style when speaking to Roxanne in the school; at the meeting, the coordinator admits that he was the one who sent Roxanne a message with a ‘love heart’ drawn on it; Roxanne requests to be placed in another programme with a different coordinator.

Roxanne tells the story very much as I have just outlined, but throughout she makes evaluative comments about the events that took place. These evocative comments reveal not only her emotive responses to the events but also the meaning she makes in her narrative of what was going on: i.e. how she interpreted the language and other semiotic resources (e.g. the image of the heart) in relation to both the relations of power between herself and the coordinator and her identities as a woman, a teacher and a member of a particular ethnic group.

Narrative Two: A Short Story

The second narrative is an excerpt from an interview with an English teacher in New Zealand, called Sela (see Barkhuizen, 2010, for an earlier study with the same teacher). She emigrated from the Pacific Island of Tonga as a young adult and embarked on university studies completing an MA in language teaching, after which she enrolled in a graduate diploma in teaching. The diploma required two periods of practicum teaching in high schools. In the short story, from an interview with Sela a few years after completing the practicum, she tells of an incident which occurred in one of the schools. I call such an extract a ‘short story’. When reporting research findings from a thematic analysis we often use short excerpts of data to illustrate themes found in data, but these are not short stories, since they have an illustrative purpose rather than being analysed in their own right. Short stories are excerpts of data extracted from a larger set of data such as conversations, interviews, written narratives, and multimodal digital stories. They are analysed in detail for both content and context and in relation to few other short stories. The fact that short stories can be extracts from lengthy, reflective journal data or research interview data and that their analysis focuses on their content rather than primarily on performance and linguistic aspects of narrative distinguishes them from ‘small stories’ (Georgakoploulou, 2006).

In terms of content, attention is systematically paid in the analysis to three intersecting dimensions of narrative: who, or the characters in the story, their relationships and their positions vis-à-vis each other; where, or the places and sequences of places in which the story action takes place; and when, or the time in which the action unfolds, past, present and future. In terms of context or scales, I have suggested (Barkhuizen, 2008) three interconnected levels of story (or contextual spaces) which not only help guide analysis but also encourage the researcher to look beyond the immediate contexts of teachers in their classrooms. The first level of story (all small letters) is personal and embodies the inner thoughts, emotions, ideas and theories of the teachers. It includes the social interactions in the teachers’ immediate contexts, for example, during classroom lessons, during conversations with students, and in teacher journals. The second level of Story (with a capital S) spreads wider than the immediate psychological and inter-personal context of teachers. Included here are interactions with institutional members outside the classroom, consequences of decisions made typically by others in the work environment, as well as their attitudes, expectations and prescriptions: e.g. a school’s language-in-education policy and assessment practices. At this level of Story, teachers usually have less agency to construct their practice, their identities and their stories. Lastly, STORY (in capital letters) refers to the broader sociopolitical contexts in which teaching and learning takes place. Here teachers have even less power to make decisions about conditions which influence their practice. Examples of STORIES include national language policies, and curriculums imposed on schools by Ministries of Education. The use of capital letters to refer to this level of STORY merely signifies a wider, macro scale and the power often associated with it. The interconnecting dimensions of the story content (who, where, when) and the three scales of context interact together to generate a narrative space within which identities are constructed and short story analysis is conducted.

In the short story, Sela tells of how one day in the school where she was doing her practicum she was mistaken for a cleaner in the staff room because of her Pacific Islander (Tongan) appearance. She had not exchanged any words with the other characters in the story – other teachers at the school – and since they did not know her they assumed she was a cleaner operating the dishwasher. Her Tongan, ‘non-white’ appearance and the association of Pacific Islanders with lower status jobs meant that the teachers in the school misinterpreted Sela’s role and her student-teacher identity. Unfortunately, this incident is what she remembers most about her practicum experience.

I now provide an illustrative analysis of this short story, using the content dimensions of who, where and when to structure my discussion. I include commentary on the three story scales of context (story, Story, STORY).

Who: Sela, as narrator, is the main character in the short story. She is an immigrant from Tonga living in New Zealand, and a pre-service student teacher completing the practicum component of her graduate diploma in education. The other characters in the story world are the following: (1) First mentioned in the story are her ‘associates’, the teachers who mentored her during the practicum, and who play no significant part in the story except that we hear they did a good job of looking after Sela. Later in the story Sela says that all teachers in the school are white, and so this would include her associate teachers. (2) The ‘white sort of culture’ refers to the demographic make-up of the school community, and reflects the socioeconomic status of the school and the suburb in which it is located. (3) ‘Islander’ students are those who come from or whose heritage is linked to the Pacific Islands. Sela strongly associates with this community and notes that there were only a few Islander students within the overwhelmingly white school community. (4) There are no Pasifika teachers in the school community, so they appear as absent but significant characters in the story. (5) ‘Everybody’ references the other teachers in the school, those whom Sela confronts in the kitchen at the dishwasher, and the characters in the story who are central to the critical incident which contests Sela’s sense of self. By considering who the characters are in this story and their relationships – how they relate to each other – we are already (at this early stage of analysis) beginning to develop an understanding of Sela’s identities, particularly those ascribed to her by others. Sela’s story makes it clear that she rejects those identities, however: she laughs when she thinks back to the experience, calling the teachers’ act of ‘mistaken identity’ a joke, saying it was ‘quite funny’. Sela, in the telling of the short story, positions the various characters and their identities, including her own, according to a set of contrasting relationships, at the same time as the teachers in the storyworld position Sela outside of their white, middle-class school-world. On the one side, then, we have Sela and the communities she identifies with; Pacific Islander, living in a lower socioeconomic suburb, and a student teacher. And on the other we have members of the socioculturally different white school community.

Where: The central action of the story unfolds in the kitchen of the high socioeconomic school. Sela mentions the lower socioeconomic suburb in which she lives to establish a contrast between her life (and social class) and that of the members of the school community. On a larger scale, beyond the school and suburb, Sela establishes a connection with the Pacific Island countries by referencing the few students and no teachers at the (New Zealand) school who are identified as Islanders. Again, this contrast foregrounds Sela’s perceived (or reflexive) identities; student teacher (not cleaner), Pacific Islander (not white), migrant (not born New Zealander), and living in a lower not high status socioeconomic suburb where the school is located.

When: The critical incident described in the story takes place over a very short period of time – a few smiles and thank-yous offered at the dishwasher in the kitchen. However, Sela says that the ‘joke’ lasted ‘quite a while’, a joke she probably shared with family and friends, and years later Sela still remembers the incident. In fact, it’s what she remembers most about her practicum to this day. The story thus covers a fairly long time scale, and will continue in Sela’s memory and probably be re-told in the future as well. Historically, as well, the story of Pacific Islander immigration to New Zealand and white New Zealander and Pacific Islander interaction is a long one. Sela’s story is one small moment embedded in that continuing long-term story involving the two groups, each constituted and defined in diverse ways.

Even this preliminary, illustrative analysis of the short story narrative space created by the intersecting who-where-when dimensions and the varying levels of context scales has shown us quite a lot about Sela’s identity experiences of becoming a teacher. Through her interactions with the teachers in the kitchen she is positioned as ‘cleaner’ (and the socioeconomic status that goes with that role), ‘migrant’ and ‘non-white’. These identities become more or less salient during the interaction and also in the telling of the story. Sela is not recognized as a student teacher on her practicum even though this is the identity that she reflexively assigns to herself while at the school. Student teacher is already a less powerful position vis-à-vis full-time, experienced, employed teacher, the type of teacher Sela encounters in the kitchen, but cleaner is arguably even more marginalized within the school context (and probably beyond). So, in this short story we see a clash of identity displays, non-compatibility between conceptions of self and identities recognized or ascribed by others, and identities constantly shifting over the course of the narrative. Short story analysis with its focus on systematic attention to the dimensions of story has generated a good understanding of Sela’s identities. Analysis of further short stories in Sela’s ongoing teacher development would reveal even more about her identity negotiation and construction.

Conclusion

In the first half of this article I presented a theoretical overview of the concept of identity, particularly focusing on poststructuralist conceptions of what identity means, and showed how these ideas can be associated with ideas about narrative and narrative inquiry. I argued that it is important for teachers, through reflective practice or teacher research, to become aware of and understand their professional identities because doing so has implications for their practice (Farrell, 2015; Varghese, et al., 2005). Asking questions such as the following will allow teachers to make connections between who they are (how they see themselves) and what they do in their classrooms, schools, and beyond: Who am I? Who was I? Who do I want to be? Why am I this way? How did I get to be this way? How does who I am relate to my professional practice?

In the second half of the article I illustrated two ways of analysing narrative data; the first, a content or thematic analysis of a written teacher journal entry, and the second, a short story analysis of an extract of an interview. Although these analyses were carried out by me, a researcher, the same methods could be used by teachers, either as an activity in a teacher education course, or as independent reflective/research work. Such methods could also be used in collaboration with teacher colleagues (see Banegas, 2012); for example, by analysing each other’s stories, or jointly analysing the stories, and even co-constructing stories in conversations or mutual interviews for later analysis. Roxanne’s narrative was one she wrote as part of a teacher education course assignment. In analysing this narrative, together with a few others, she engaged with what she thought about her professional self in relation to others in a real working context. She thus began to make sense of her place and role in that context and how her identities related to her practice. Sela did not systematically analyse her interview short story, though my continuing conversations with her about her teaching experiences, which include the two of us looking closely at the narrative data we generate together, means that she has the opportunity to step back from her busy teaching life to consider her place within it and how that relates to what she does as a professional both now and in the future.

I end this article by suggesting a number of teacher identity-related topics for further research or reflection. Although there are many methods associated with narrative inquiry, a thematic analysis or a short story approach is a good place to start.