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Purpose – The purpose of this research was to make visible the process of analyzing our narratives of teacher identity.

Design/methodology/approach – These narratives of teacher identity were generated by isolating critical incidents and then drafting them as emblematic narratives. They were then shared with each other and compared against the tool of chronotopic motif developed by Bakhtin.

Findings – We found that our narratives, when filtered through the tool of chronotopic motif, reveal ambivalence about whether we desire to be known or unknown as teacher educators and as people. As we unpack our findings, we move through the tool of chronotopic motif, piece by piece, illuminating our stories by themselves, in relationship with each other, and against the professional literature on teacher educator identity and identity in general.

Practical implications – As teacher educators, we think it is important for others, particularly students, to be known. However, we are ambivalent about whether we want to be known and if so, by whom, and in what pockets of space and temporality.

Social implications – This research has implications for discussions of professional identity, role confusion in teacher education, and professional women in general. It adds to a growing body of literature suggesting that identity is a holistic process that factors heavily into what happens in the context of teacher education courses at a university.

Originality/value – Our chapter demonstrates to colleagues how to conduct a narrative analysis using a tool from literary theory.

Arguments for the development and use of narrative inquiry come out of a view of human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives. People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms of these stories. Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which his or her experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful. Viewed this way, narrative is the phenomena studied in inquiry. Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as methodology entails a view of the phenomena. To use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a particular view of experience as phenomena under study. (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 377)

As narrative inquirers in the midst of our journeys as researchers and teacher educators, we restory a portion of our journeys here, as an invitation for readers to live alongside us – living, telling, reliving, retelling (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994). What resonance, tension, questions, or stories emerge as we enter the past?

Elaine Chan is a teacher educator in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches undergraduate courses in Multicultural Education and graduate courses in diversity, Curriculum Studies, and research methodology. She was an elementary level teacher in Canada and in Japan, and has conducted research in Canadian, American, and Japanese schools. Her research focuses on ways children, teachers, and families experience school curriculum, and ways in which identity, culture, and curriculum intersect on school landscapes in transition. She is coauthor of the book, Teaching the Arts to Engage English Language Learners with Margaret Macintyre Latta.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an evidence-based environmental scanning model that will provide a methodological framework for conducting community-engaged and community-focused research, with a particular emphasis on northern communities in Canada.

The study has adopted a multifaceted environmental scanning approach to understand the Inuvialuit Settlement Region communities. The research design is informed by various environmental models as discussed in literature from a broad range of domains such as business, library and information science (LIS), and a sophisticated multimethod data gathering approach that included field trips, observations, surveys, as well as informal methods of community engagement.

The paper proposes an environmental scan model as a novel approach to community-focused digital library (DL) development. The paper identifies both macro- and micro-environmental landscapes as applicable to the development of a DL for communities in Canada’s North. The macro-environmental landscapes include: geographical, historical and sociocultural, political and regulatory, economic, technological, competition, and human resource. The micro-environmental landscapes include: stakeholder and community, linguistic, information resource, and ownership.

The environmental scanning model and its key components presented in this paper provide a novel and concrete example of a project that aims to organize information for increased access and to create value through the design and implementation of an infrastructure for a cultural heritage DL. The environmental scan model will also contribute to both research and practice in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS), particularly in the area of DL development for rural, remote, and indigenous communities.