Conference Agenda

Within teacher education research, qualitative approaches that foreground teachers’ experience and meaning-making, such as phenomenography and narrative inquiry, are well established and theoretically developed. Both approaches have been widely used to explore teachers’ learning, professional identity, and understandings of practice across different educational contexts (Åkerlind, 2025; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Kelchtermans, 2009), with recent qualitative studies continuing to draw on these traditions to examine teachers’ professional sense-making in situated contexts (e.g. Dahl, 2024; Eryılmaz & Dikilitaş, 2023; Yau et al., 2023). At the same time, methodological scholarship has pointed out that qualitative analysis rarely unfolds in a linear or procedurally transparent manner once a methodological framework has been selected. Rather than progressing through clearly defined analytic steps, qualitative analysis often involves iterative movement between empirical material, emerging interpretations, and theoretical resources (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003; Braun & Clarke, 2019; Morgan, 2014). In teacher education research, this nonlinearity becomes particularly evident when researchers analyse teachers’ accounts of experience, identity, and professional meaning-making.

In research on teachers’ experience, such analytic work frequently brings researchers to points where provisional categories feel unstable, interpretive moves are difficult to justify, or different methodological commitments pull the analysis in competing directions. These difficulties are not simply matters of analytic skill. Rather, they reflect structural tensions inherent in researching teachers’ experience, where interpretation necessarily involves judgement that cannot be fully formalised as a method (Kelchtermans, 2009). Although analytic uncertainty and interpretive tension are widely acknowledged in methodological discussions of reflexivity, the analytic labour through which such uncertainty is negotiated is rarely made explicit in published research accounts. Reflexive methodological work has demonstrated that analytic decisions are frequently portrayed as coherent and linear in retrospect, with minimal indication of hesitation, revision, or doubt in research writing (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). Consequently, the practical processes involved in generating qualitative claims often stay implicit, particularly in journal articles, because of strict word limits.

This research workshop takes analytic uncertainty itself as a methodological object. It is grounded in the author’s completed doctoral study of primary school teachers’ understandings of a literacy-and-literature curriculum (YuWen) in mainland China. The study is used not as an exemplar of methodological success, but as a worked case through which analytic difficulty can be examined. The research combined phenomenography and narrative inquiry to explore how teachers conceptualised their subject and how their professional subjectivity was constituted through accounts of schooling, upbringing, and work. Phenomenography was used to describe qualitatively different ways of understanding the curriculum and the structural relations among these variations (Marton & Booth, 1997; Åkerlind, 2005), while narrative analysis attended to how meaning was produced through language, plot, positioning, and evaluative stance within teachers’ accounts (Riessman, 2008).

While both approaches are well established within teacher education research, their combined use generated moments of analytic uncertainty that could not be resolved through procedural guidance alone. Rather than attempting to eliminate such tensions in advance, the workshop foregrounds them as sites in which methodological judgement becomes visible. By engaging participants with concrete analytic material, the workshop opens space for collective reflection on how analytic decisions are made, questioned, and revised in qualitative teacher education research.