Stories of personal and professional relationship experiences and meanings shaping the making of teacher leaders.

Abstract

This study, titled Stories of Personal and Professional Relationship Experiences and Meanings Shaping the Making of Teacher Leaders, explored the lived experiences of four South African teachers from two different schooling contexts (Quintile 1 and Quintile 5). The investigation zoomed into four teachers’ personal and professional relationships with significant others to understand the meanings they made and the beliefs they acquired in constructing the self. The findings were achieved by eliciting data on how they negotiated everyday relationships and situations as teachers. This study was framed by Hunsicker’s (2017) conceptual visual model, which assisted me in conceptualising what it means to be a classroom teacher leader, how classroom teacher leaders position themselves in everyday situations (i.e., as situational leaders), and the opportunities teachers have for developing themselves as teacher/developing teacher leaders. Understanding these teachers' past and current experiences was critical for gaining a deep insight into their lives and understanding how they had become what they were as informal teacher leaders. This study utilised narrative inquiry to explore the past and present stories of the participating teachers. The methods used to generate data were arts-based, including artifact inquiry (particularly the memory box method), memory drawings, and unstructured interviews. These data collection methods provided the teacher participants with a free, safe, and open space to share their deep and complex storied experiences of their personal and professional relationships. These reconstructed teacher stories that emplotted their personal and professional relationships assisted me in understanding the process of developing into teacher leader. This study deepened my understanding that the ‘teacher leader’ concept means that such teachers are at post level 1 without formal leadership titles (such as Head of Department or Deputy Principal). By zooming into the selected teachers’ personal and professional relationship experiences, I could explore their beliefs of themselves through outside expectations and stereotypical roles. Evidently, these informal leaders in the educational context embraced supportive and caring relationships that opened up ways for what they wanted to become as individuals and how they transformed their beliefs and embraced new learnings of what is possible within and outside of their lives as classroom teachers. Forming new relationships engenders a new outlook on existing beliefs. As was the case for my four participants, new ways of thinking can expose new learning spaces and development where ‘ordinary’ teachers can find their ‘extraordinary’ attributes and position themselves in making themselves informal teacher leaders.