Shaping a Professional Identity: Stories of Educational Practice

This book extends Connelly and Clandinin’s groundbreaking work on “personal practical knowledge” as the way through which teachers hone their craft― Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes (1995). Working with a group of teacher researchers, they address the question of how professional identities are formed. The volume includes richly textured stories of professional lives in teacher, administrative, and curriculum-making settings. These thoroughly readable, autobiographical depiction’s help unravel the narrative interweavings of professional contexts, teacher knowledge, and teacher identity. The authors’ insightful interpretations of these stories provide valuable implications for teacher education, professional development, and progressive school change.<br/>“This book puts it all together: teacher stories, administrator stories, and above all an insightful discussion of how these stories relate to knowledge and context.”<br/>Michael Fullan, University of Toronto<br/><br/>“Offers profound insights to students of education….through these stories, and the authors’ analysis of them, we gain a unique angle on how schools operate and the complexity of what we must know to help make them better.”<br/>Joe L. Kincheloe, Pennsylvania State University and CUNY-Brooklyn College