Narrating the best-loved self: teacher identity, empowerment and curriculum as identity work in Iranian teacher education

Teacher professional longevity and pedagogical efficacy are increasingly challenged by systemic pressures, often undermining professional identity. This study explores the ‘best-loved self’ (BLS), a construct representing educators’ most authentic and flourishing state, and proposes a curriculum framework to cultivate it. Using narrative inquiry that attends to temporality, sociality and place, we examine how educators at Farhangian University of Yazd construct their BLS through storytelling. In-depth interviews with fifteen teachers across professional stages yield three illustrative cases showing how Iranian educators negotiate tensions between personal values and institutional demands. Analysis reveals that the BLS emerges through recursive cycles of endeavour, energy, epiphany and echoing within relational and cultural contexts. The proposed framework – emphasising psychological empowerment, self-enrichment, professional becoming, and educational altruism – offers a contextually grounded interpretive model for teacher education programmes in centralised systems, supporting professional self-actualisation and transformative learning through narrative reconstruction and mutual engagement.