Chapter 4: Methodology: Gathering Career History Narratives

As discussed in Chapter 1, the post-1988 era in England has been characterised by a succession of educational policy changes, and a consequent shift in the culture of schooling. I wanted to understand more about the experiences and perceptions of teachers who had worked career-long in this shifting policy and cultural context. Specifically, I wanted to understand how policy shift has been experienced by teachers in the post-1988 era, a largely under-researched generation of teachers. In this chapter, I discuss the research design and the research process my co-researchers and I devised to gather insights into career-long teachers’ experiences of implementing the reforms.