Narrative Inquiries into Teachers' Fostering Their Best-Loved Selves in Rural China

This three-paper dissertation narratively explores how teachers self-develop and move themselves toward “best-loved self” in rural areas of China, which is a high accountability environment plagued with inequalities of opportunity and a scarcity of resources. The core theoretical underpinnings grounding the three papers are: Dewey’s philosophy of experience; Connelly and Clandinin’s personal practical knowledge of teachers; Craig’s teacher knowledge communities and Schwab’s best-loved self conceptualization. Each paper focuses on one teacher participant. Through employing the narrative inquiry method, the three papers find participants who are dealing with similar challenges at rural schools and who have been investing their efforts in fostering their best-loved selves from different venues. The first participant integrates his personal being with his professional being through reflective narrative sharing and conversations with members in an online teacher community. The second participant, whose emotions and identities were mediated by varied “teacher knowledge communities” off his own campus, has his voice heard and supports his best-loved self through increased self-agency and enriched identity development. The third participant constructs and reconstructs his counter stories with his students and teacher colleagues in the mist of competing and conflicting “meganarrative” within his rural school. The ultimate research goal of this series of papers is to bridge the “policy-research-practice gap” in teacher development, retention and induction through using bottom-up approach to examine teachers’ varied experiences in rural China