ABSTRACT
Only by coming to understand the many and complex dimensions of our Belizean colleagues’ lives were we able to reimagine and reconfigure professional development as a more collaborative and participatory enterprise. Because of this, we felt it was important to include what we learned about our colleagues’ lives as part of our findings. This learning deeply troubled and reconfigured our understanding of the significance of life histories in creating durable identities as educators and the effects these durable identities have on instructional practices and outcomes, including enormous changes we describe in the subsequent findings chapters. In other words, although the material in this chapter might appear as a digression, it is essential for understanding the landscape of effects that constitute the bulk of our findings. Finally, although we provide annotations about what we learned and how we were changed by getting to know our Belizean colleagues more intimately, and although we note how these storytelling and listening experiences link to theory and research, for verisimilitude’s sake, we mostly let our colleagues’ words and stories speak for themselves.
