How teachers become teacher researchers: Narrative as a tool for teacher identity construction

While scholarship on teacher research suggests the value of this work for teaching and learning, there are challenges in sustaining it beyond teacher education, in part because teachers may not envision themselves as researchers. Drawing on sociocultural theories of identity, this paper uses discourse analysis to consider how an instructor in a graduate course on teacher research supported inservice teachers in constructing identities as teacher researchers. The analysis identifies the ways the instructor used personal narratives as a tool to intentionally position teachers as teacher researchers as participants discursively negotiated these identities.