Forms, Foci and Forces: The Need for Overseas Pre-Service Teacher Professional Experiences

Abstract

This paper represents the first analytic foray into a “narrative inquiry” that focused on collecting data centered on understanding the impact of an overseas professional teaching experience on twenty pre-service teachers. Research in this paradigm seeks to explore the breadth and depth of individual’s ‘lived experience’. A key axiomatic position regarding data collection and data analysis in a ‘lived experience’ project is that the human condition is grounded in the nature and nuances of the narratives we each tell ourselves. These narratives are deeply hermeneutic in nature and are contextually situated, cyclical, transient, multi-voiced and are constantly being reframed.