Loosening chronology’s collar: reframing teacher career narratives as stories of life and work without end

This paper affirms the power and potential in the turn to narrative for research into teachers’ careers but explores a methodological limitation within this move that may have narrowed the repertoire of plot structures used to construct teachers’ career stories. It considers a variant methodological orientation for the representation of career narratives. This orientation is grounded in an assumption that teacher career stories do not necessarily pursue a narrative chronology, where stories possess an obvious beginning, middle and end. The paper presents a ‘career portrait’—an ethnographic sketch of a teacher’s career—so as to indicate something of the data that might be generated when a less teleological narrative research frame is used for the study of teachers’ careers.