Applying the methodological tool of the life story, this chapter addresses the issue of the professional identity of teachers of French in secondary schools in France. I will explain this specific choice of issue and method by answering the reader's usual question, ‘What position does the author speak from?’. This requires some background information on my own professional and intellectual development both as a researcher and academic.

As a researcher in scientific linguistics, I have worked for 20 years on the life story as a tool for collecting data within the framework of the social sciences. As an academic, I teach language and literary theory at a university, on the one hand, and on the other, French as a school subject as part of teacher training at an Academic School of Education, the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres (IUFM). Recently, the opportunity arose to supersede this divided situation: in 1999, the French Ministry of Education decided to specify and change the academic criteria for teacher training, and to develop research within this field.

This new approach, that was already intended with the creation of the Academic Schools of Education in 1991 but not implemented, seeks to apply research findings and academic knowledge to teacher training. The challenge now is to utilise educational research and that of neighbouring disciplines to move away from the old tradition of training as the mere transmission of professional practice by experienced teachers to a new kind of scientifically based training that takes into account the issue of professional identity. In this context, I was able to ‘import’ my work on life stories into the field of training and to think through the issue of personal identity. For me this meant moving away from theorising the life story as a linguistic object to practising it as a methodological tool and integrating educational science in an interdisciplinary approach. This process has taken place within a research project set up by the School of Education. The project required that experienced teachers involved in training – that is, non-researchers – must be integrated in the research team.

Based on the research processes and initial findings of the project, this chapter focuses on the relevance of the life story as a research device in understanding professional identity.