PERSONAL WAYS INTO AND FORWARD IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

This article will discuss ‘the perspective of the personal’ in education (Pope & Denicolo, 2001) through the presentation of research on Swedish EFL teachers’ experiences of teacher training and continuing professional development, part of a more extended and eclectic study on language teachers’ personal theories and experiences of change (Apelgren, 2001). Drawing on the constructivist stance of ‘teacher-the-storyteller’ (Pope, 1995; Pope & Denicolo, 2001), the research concerns teachers’ personal theories about their paths into the teaching profession and the constructivist view of teachers as active, meaning-seeking human beings open to change and development. The result presented in this article consists of career-rivers and two interviews with 14 teachers from a cohort of 70 teachers. Responded validation was used for the first interview draft before the second interview as well as on the final analyses and results. A combination of constructivist and phenomenological analytical tools was used in the analyses: content analysis and empirical phenomenological psychological analysis (Apelgren, 2001 and 2010). By identifying ‘general pedagogic intentionality’, foreign language teachers’ ways of developing and changing could be described. The results showed four major themes in the way the teachers had experienced change and development. It also revealed that the way an individual teacher changes, depends to great extent on personal factors.