The merits of diversity to business success are well documented. Nevertheless, classroom diversity remains undermaximized in postmillennial schools. Differences across students' cultures, prior experiences, and even resiliency are often approached as deficits versus assets in learning. In addition, although educator awareness is increasing,…

The aim of this paper is to identify and describe the key traits of research with life histories. Previous studies on disability and my own work conducting research with the life histories and university experiences of students with disabilities help to explain how these key characteristics manifest themselves in practice. There are six traits…

In Denmark various non-traditional students are mature-age students who already have some kind of a vocational background. When applying to do a professional degree, most of them fall outside the traditional admission requirements, which is why individual assessment of applicants is necessary for bachelor programmes. This article examines the case…

People's true selves comprise a life story that may be considered as a narrative. With that idea in mind, the purpose of this article is to report on a pedagogical intervention that bridged life stories and a narrative perspective to examine nine, out of eighty, pre-service English language teachers' (re)construction of their true selves while…

Qualified and skilled sport coaches are vital to the development of sport in general and of elite sport in particular. Research suggests that the development of coaching expertise in elite sport is a complex matter involving mediated, unmediated and internal learning situations. However, it is less clear to what extent and in which ways these…

The purpose of this study was to examine how three PE teachers' personal biographies before their formal teacher education programs influenced their early careers in urban schools. Using occupational socialization theory and cultural relevance theory, we conducted in-depth interviews and observed early career physical education teachers who did…

Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework, a team of university staff and educators at a traditionally under-performing urban elementary school built a collaboration aimed at enhancing writing instruction. The current qualitative research study, which was part of this larger project, focused on biography writing in Eva…

Early teacher socialization research in the 1980s examined student-teachers during their transition from pre-service to in-service contexts, and argued for a limited effect of teacher education programs compared to students' initial socialization into the profession of teaching as past-students or apprentices of observation. Although…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze and interpret the stories told by one teacher, Ms. M, in a fifth grade science classroom. In this study, stories are defined as teacher utterances that are used in first person or third person narrative view, and are related to an experience that occurred outside the classroom. This research…

In this paper, we describe a 30-month qualitative exploration of diverse teachers' identities in a high-poverty, bilingual, K-8 public charter school in rural eastern Oregon. First, we use the perspectives of saberes docentes and a situated view of teacher development to document the life histories of monolingual and bilingual teachers at Vista…

This paper presents a qualitative study about how teachers entering the profession at different times over the last five decades made sense of their professional lives and continuing professional development (CPD) experiences against the backdrop of the CPD policy infrastructure and wider educational context in Hong Kong. The life history method…

This study suggests the need for complex research approaches that provide richer, contested, and nondichotomous portrayals of classrooms, schooling life, and teachers. Drawing from a qualitative study of Tajik teachers' practices and perspectives (Niyozov, 2001) and studies on teaching conducted in Kyrgyzstan (De Young, Reeves, & Valyaeva ,…

This dissertation reports on a qualitative investigation of two research questions: What experiences lead secondary social studies teachers to become passionate and committed to teaching toward social justice? How do these teachers conceptualize and practice teaching toward social justice in the social studies? The study, which employed a life…

This article demonstrates how life history methods can be used to trace preservice teachers' emergent ethics toward teaching for equity and social justice. Through qualitative analyses of 10 European American, middle-class, female preservice teachers' life history interviews, access to diverse individuals and diverse materials was identified as a…

This symposium paper reports on developing biographical qualitative research methods, mixing personal narrative and conceptualization. The section on "Learning To Do" begins with an autobiographical report on a study of an urban classroom during which the author developed his early techniques for qualitative research, including the…