ABSTRACT
We examine how two female Singapore participants in higher education came to confront and examine critical events as life traumas in their personal and professional lives through narrative inquiry as individuals, in task-bound groups, and as members of a storytelling community. We analyse how transformative narrative agency is achieved through narrating difficult life encounters, a process, though once profoundly personal, is made collectively meaningful, transformative, and, crucially, metaphorical. We uncover and articulate the network of entailments emerging from their central metaphors. This enables us to build an analytical framework for self-narratives that positions metaphors as the crux of teacher identity.
