Historicizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Middle-Ground: A Study of Four Cohorts of Elementary Teachers’ Life Hi/stories in the Republic of Cyprus (Late 1970s–2010s)

In this chapter, we examine the connections of teacher professionalism and teacher education curricula across four cohorts of Greek-Cypriot elementary school teachers, which correspond to different periods during the last 40 years in the Republic of Cyprus. We do so through a dual move: focusing on the middle-ground, we approach teacher education curricula as emergent in teachers’ life hi/stories, and looking across generations, we explore these stories as contingent to changing sociohistorical and institutional contexts. Data collection involved multiple interviews with 28 study participants to construct their life histories, providing the basis for cross-case analyses within and across teacher cohorts. Teachers’ life histories brought forth notable differences in the ways in which teacher education and the profession were construed across and within cohorts. These differences concerned the types of knowledge that emerged in teachers’ constructions of teacher education curricula as biographical text/s, which enabled a view of the curriculum as lived and hence as a complex nexus of personal, institutional, and sociohistorical forces. This is explored through two key themes: the disciplinarity of knowledge and the (non)academization of experience in lived teacher education curricula; and the emergence of the theory-practice debate as central to teachers’ education and constitution as professionals. The chapter calls for attention to the production of local meanings as a means for understanding the historicity and topology of teacher education and professionalism, as these narrations suggest a changing landscape of teacher education as permeated by and simultaneously contributing to changing circumstances of higher education and the teaching profession.