‘Doubly situated teacher professionalism’: School culture, personal narrations and becoming a teacher in Danish schools

Abstract

Schools are sites of professional becoming, yet the links between individual professionalisation and school culture are overlooked in the literature. This article explores how one teacher achieved professional competence while working in three different schools in Denmark through personal narrations of institutionally instigated processes of professional becoming. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives spanning narrative approaches, situated learning, ethnography and Bourdieu’s field theory, the findings suggest that the development of teacher professionalism is doubly situated in school cultures: first, through each school’s emergence as a distinct sociocultural organisation of participation, meaning-making and competence; and second, through teachers’ personal narrations and meaning-making in relation to specific school cultures.