Drawing upon data from a life history study of Norwegian physical education (PE) teachers, this paper examines teacher socialization from the perspective of it being problematic, rather than automatic, and reveals the dialectics of individual experience within wider socioeconomic and political structures. Three stories about teacher socialization are reconstructed from in-depth interviews with a 54-year-old female PE teacher, with a view to illustrating how individual agency, though an important feature of teacher socialization, is limited by access to power within structures and experienced very differently as a result of one’s structural position. The reader is invited to enter a process of ‘emancipatory storysharing’ which is facilitated by the momentary suspension of an explicit theoretical analysis of the life history, followed by two contrasting interpretations of the case study, with the aim of kindling critical reflection about her/his own and others’ teacher/teacher educator socialization.
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