Abstract
Social efficacy as canonical myths is present as curricula designed to translate global and local knowledge and manifests itself in the sub-urban experiences of daily teacher work. As teachers we need opportunities to connect the personal with a curriculum dominated identity; a human kind of experience, with research as a living guide to meaning. Education continues the research on teacher identity in systems. The relative habitat of self in the context of teaching however, is a topic still under review, especially as it applies to the storying of self in a collective professional life-world and the artefact s and icons of system logic. I use autobiography combined with narrative inquiry as literary media to explore the teacher as a vocational being with a human map connected to others. Storying serves as an empathetic bridge to development and invites reflexive practice, as we recollect our lives and reflect on experience. I use the ‘technique’ of poly-vocal writing as evocative exploration to discuss identity among the overt and covert nature of teaching and infuse autobiography with interpretation, calling on salient literature as referent voices. Conscious constructed tales enabled me to explore the archetypal, reflexive and metaphorical act s of human meaning in the context of practice. In my thesis I act as an imaginative interpreter, drawing on experiences as teacher, writer, artist and creative facilitator providing a unilateral voice in the practice of knowing the self as a referent to knowing the other. And, as stories often go, I became an insider-observer or locus inquirer, to facilitate teachers as ethnographers of the self, as the reading and writing agents for transformation.