The relationship of the story line to scripts and social context is reviewed in Scrutinising Life Stories. The chapter argues that ‘the collection of stories especially the mainstream stories that live out a prior script, will merely fortify patterns of domination. We shall need to move from life stories to life histories, from narratives to genealogies of context, towards a modality that embraces “stories of action within theories of context”’. The chapter provides examples of mid-life progress narratives and scholarship boy stories which show ‘the intimate relationship between social circumstances and cultural storylines. In a real sense social structures push storylines in particular directions and the stories then legitimate the structures – and so on, in a self-legitimating circle’. But I add that the relationship between social structure and the story is ‘loosely coupled and stories can resist as well as enhance the imperatives of structure’.

Action Research and the Reflexive Project of Selves grows from a series of life history interviews with key proponents of the educational movement called Action Research. The picture that emerges adds new perspectives as to how educational and social movements gain their adherents. A conventional view might be that new recruits to a social movement are converted by reading the main texts or hearing keynote lectures from the main advocates. What emerges from our interviews is rather more extended than such ready ‘conventions’. A personal set of transitions are seen in process and the ongoing construction of identity projects and lifestyles plays an important part.

The final three chapters concentrate on ways of representing the world of the teacher. In Representing Teachers the popular genre of teachers stories and narratives is reviewed. The genre is located in the historical period of its emergence. It is argued that with the end of ideology, the end of the Cold War, we see the emergence of a cult of personality and celebrity. Associated with this has been a growing movement towards personal narratives and stories, not least in the field of educational study. ‘Once again the personal narrative, the practical story, celebrates the end of the trauma of the Cold War and the need for a human space away from politics, away from power. It is a thoroughly understandable nirvana, but it assumes that power and politics have somehow ended.’ In the period following the Cold War we have soon moved on to the war on terror. In a recent television programme made by Richard Curtis called ‘The Power of the Nightmares’ he asserts that politicians having failed to deliver our dreams with the collapse of ideologies have now set themselves up to protect us from our nightmares. The retreat into the personal domain is therefore likely to continue apace and our paradigms of educational study in pursuing an antidote should provide new ways to connect back in to collective history and sociopolitical context.

Sponsoring the Teachers Voice provides a set of guidelines for investigating life histories as a way of exploring the teachers life and work. The development of teachers life histories provides a contextual background to the teachers practice, and to the changes over time. An increasing range of work is building our understanding of the teachers life and work: Much of the work that is emerging on teachers lives throws up structural insights which locate the teachers life within the deeply structured and embedded environment of schooling. The Personality of Change provides further evidence for this contention. The work grows out of the wide range of life history interviews conducted on the Spencer Project in the USA and Canada, called Change Over Time. The study was set up to explore school change over a 30 to 40 year period. Our interviews covered three cohorts of teachers (although some teachers cover all three periods): the teachers from the 1950s and 1960s (Cohort 1); the 1970s and 1980s (Cohort 2) and the teachers from the 1990s through to the projects end in 2001.

If you are lucky, research has its epiphanic moments – mostly delivered at unexpected times in unpredicted ways! For me, in this project it was trying out some interview schedules with Cohort 3 teachers. We had added a final question to try to get some sense of where teaching work was placed in the full spectrum of the activities of a life, ‘are there any projects or interests outside your work that you would like to tell us about?’ With some exceptions many Cohort 1 and 2 teachers had provided stories which placed their teaching as a central life project, a ‘passion’ or a ‘vocation’, even a ‘calling’. Teaching was their ‘life work and a source of enduring meaning and commitment in their lives’. Moreover, and this was often very clearly stated, teaching gave their life personal meaning within a collective project or vocation that expressed firmly held beliefs and values.

For Cohort 3 teachers this latter sense was seldom present. In the early stages of the interview, they often defined their teaching as ‘just a job’, ‘only a pay cheque’, ‘I turn up and do what I’m told between 8 and 5’, ‘I follow the rules’. Others went on to say that they did a good job, and some that they enjoyed the work, but not one linked their work to a broader public or social vision. My epiphany came when they talked about ‘other interests or projects’. There the change of body language was deafening; they leaned forward in their seats, their eyes shone, their hand movements were animated. ‘Did they have other interests?’ ‘Oh yes, I’m planning to get out in the next two years and start a beauty clinic . . . I’m so excited’; ‘I’m training in the evenings to become an occupational therapist, I cant wait to begin my life’, ‘I’m saving up so as to retire at 50 – it's only five years away. . . then my life will begin.’

For these teachers it would seem their work and its meaning are being transformed and uncoupled from wider collective visions and public purposes. Other research for instance the work of Robert Putnam and Richard Sennett points to a similar pattern: a growing range of studies illustrate a crisis of personal meaning and collective, public purpose at the heart of Western life. It seems the New World Order is failing to deliver personal meanings and narratives linked to wider public purposes. It is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of its own citizens in the intimate heartlands of their own stories. This may be calamitous for the delivery of better public services and a reinvigorated public life. In the life histories of ordinary people the effects have yet to be fully seen for these are early days in the global warming of human storylines. Our continuing study of life histories and life politics will provide vital evidence as to whether these patterns are consolidated or reversed.