Composing a Life in Two Knowledge Landscapes

While researchers (Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2013) have long argued that teachers’ identities are complex interwoven tapestries of the personal and the professional, and that teachers’ knowledge is both personal and practical, we are beginning to see that something else is also at work. In Chapter 10 we suggest that teachers live in two knowledge landscapes, the professional knowledge landscape with its in- and out-of-classroom places shaped by secret, sacred, and cover stories, as well as a personal knowledge landscape. As we attended to the experiences of the six teachers who left within their first five years of teaching, we awakened to not only their experiences in the professional knowledge landscape but also their experiences in what we are now calling the personal knowledge landscape. As we looked to the ways they were composing their lives in both landscapes, we were increasingly attentive to how they sought to live out who they were, and were becoming, in and across these two knowledge landscapes.