Constructing a narrative of teacher development: Piecing together teacher stories, teacher lives, and teacher educatio

The focus for this dissertation emerged out of a curiosity about how teachers learn to teach, to develop, to grow. Qualitative methodologies, whose purposes are to come to understand experiences from the perspectives and descriptions of the individuals involved, were used. The inquiry was guided by the following general questions: What stories do teachers tell when they describe their own development as teachers? What do teachers' narratives reveal about their own professional development? How will teacher narratives inform educational practice? It was also guided by connections made between quilt construction, dissertation writing, and the stories the teachers told.;The inquiry was situated in philosophical hermeneutics, a way of interpreting life experiences as text (Ricoeur, 1981, 1984) and narrative inquiry, the study of how individuals construct meaning of their experiences by telling stories that connect their pasts and create purpose in their futures (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). Mishler's (1986) interviewing method, which describes interviewing as meaningful speech between speakers of a shared language, was used to interview fifteen women beginning elementary teachers about their development as teachers. Their stories revealed that the process of becoming a teacher involves discovering, experimenting, reassessing, exploring, and often redefining self as an individual and as a teacher. They also revealed that while the paths that teachers take in their ongoing processes of becoming teachers are not the same, they are influenced by their relationships with others, their past experiences, and their sense of self. Additionally, the stories revealed that the construction of a teacher's sense of self is personally organized, not professionally organized.;These discoveries add to the small but growing body of knowledge about teachers' biographies, which suggests that it is not primarily the teacher education programs that establish teacher role identity, but, rather, it is their previous life experiences as they relate to education and teaching. These discoveries suggest that different approaches to facilitating teacher development, which involve active participation by individuals in constructing and reconstructing their experiences and their understandings within the broader contexts of the lives they live and the schools in which they teach and learn, should be implemented in teacher education programs.