Abstract:
This research is about how beginning and experienced teachers can use anecdotes as a tool to step inside their own understandings of themselves as learners and teachers and gain greater appreciation of themselves as professional educators. The challenge is to develop tools and strategies which promote a dialogical process whereby the professional educator can engage in critical reflection in a private and public professional conversation in an ongoing safe and supportive context. The focus of this research has been to investigate how a specific tool, anecdote, can be used by beginning and experienced teachers to engage in a critically reflective dialogue about their tacit knowledge and understandings of learning and teaching, their role as teachers and how their practice is or could be affected by those understandings.