A collection of personal, contextualized stories of teachers assessing their own experiences in gaining expertise as language teachers. Preservice and inservice teachers will benefit from the insights provided in this book, as will Language Teacher Educators and education researchers.

This book explores teachers' understanding of the personal and professional experiences that have informed their language teaching. The intent of the hardback edition is to bring into our professional conversations teachers' “ways of knowing” - that is, teachers' understanding of the experiences that have informed their language teaching. By making teachers' ways of knowing public, open to review, and accessible to others in this profession, this text hopes to validate, in ways afforded to other forms of scholarly work, teachers' own understanding of the activity of language teaching.

What role does narrative play in building teachers' knowledge? In this timely volume, foremost scholars in the field of education not only open, but they deepen the conversation about the uses of narrative in the construction of teachers' knowledge.

Explores how individuals' identity and personal practical knowledge are being formed, shifted or interrupted through moments in teacher education.

As top-down educational reform policies at local and national levels increasingly isolate teachers from their own professional and instructional agency, and stultify children’s passion for learning, new techniques are needed for understanding and transforming educational practices. Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School: Learning to Teach, Teaching Well facilitates meaningful change in early years education by providing early childhood and elementary school teachers with methods to incorporate narrative into their instruction and inquiry. This book offers practical strategies for incorporating narrative tools and structures into the classroom, and encouraging effective conceptual, pedagogical, and personal avenues for engaged teaching and learning across languages and cultures. The book’s chapters promote a lively discussion of central tenets of narrative inquiry and illustrative examples of teachers at work with narrative and inquiry for improving their practice and children’s learning.

Research on teacher learning has too often excluded personal development in considering professional development. This timely book argues that the development of a professional identity is inextricable from personal identity. It suggests that when teachers are given the opportunity to compose their own stories of learning within a supportive community, they can then begin to compose new narratives of identity and practice. This book is a critical tool for educators seeking to refine their teaching practice and author their own development.

This book explores the reflective potentialities offered by analyses of teachers’ professional learning narratives. The book has a specific focus on narratives on professional learning and professional identities emerging from different contexts and gives a deeper understanding of successful teachers’ narratives globally. Diverging from universally standardized constructions of idealized teacher identity and professional learning, the book provides analyses of a diversified set of cases with detailed descriptions of each teacher’s idiographic and professional context to gain a deeper understanding of situated professional identities. With contributions from a range of international backgrounds, it shows teachers of various age groups, subject areas and curricula contribute their narratives to help readers reflect on different trajectories toward becoming a teacher. These narratives provide insight into and a deeper understanding of the conditions and complex processes that being a "successful" teacher involves within these case studies, providing a useful contribution to the field of teacher education. Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching: International Narratives of Successful Teachers will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students of teacher education and international and comparative education.