Impact of Career Challenges and Obstacles on Educators' Lives: A Collaborative Narrative Inquiry

• In Event: Challenges and Triumphs in Teaching

Abstract

This narrative inquiry delves into the career challenges and obstacles that educators inevitably face over the course of their careers in teaching and teacher education. These issues arise from forces at work on educational landscapes: competition, differing strengths, different assessments of contribution, lack of fit, power struggles, tensions between personalities and the like. Four members of a teacher research group discuss struggles experienced along their career trajectories. Their narratives revolve around shifting educational landscapes, gender/gender identification, and age. Group members discuss how making sense of their career challenges in their knowledge community helped them to access different points of view and to story themselves into new stories to live by or stories to begin again by.

Authors

• Peter Timothy Martindell, University of Houston - Downtown

• Michaelann Kelley, Mount St. Joseph University

• Gayle A. Curtis, University of Houston

• Cheryl J. Craig, Texas A&M University - College Station