ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the foundations on which the rest of the book is based and introduces many of the ideas and terms of reference further examined in the rest of Part I and illustrated from practice in Part II. Through my own experience as a teacher, my experience with student
teachers and with practising teachers, I have come to believe that teachers are not all of one ‘tribe’, who share rituals, customs, discourse and traditions. Instead, there are individuals, people, professionals who select, shape, reshape and transcend ways of working so that any sense of ‘tribal morality’ is ‘peripheral to [their] personal integrity’ (Allport 1955: 34). I have also begun to understand Bruner’s claim that ‘selfhood is profoundly relational’ and that the ‘construction of selfhood cannot proceed without a capacity to narrate’ (Bruner 2002: 86). This must be particularly true of teachers and others working within a professional community of practice (Wenger 1998), whose narrations inevitably find a level of interface from which individual narratives rebound and reform. This idea of self-making through narrative, in my study, can be generally applied to the children, their teachers and their researcher, which is itself the subject of analysis.
