This paper presents a narrative inquiry approach to understanding the early professional development (PD) of student teachers of English at a state university in Turkey. With the twofold functioning of narrative as a tool for both research and PD, we probe into how student teachers’ early PD trajectories are shaped through observational narrative knowledging. Data consisted of group discussions, semi-structured interviews, metaphor elicitations, and informal conversations that accompanied the main data collection tool, i.e., narrative frames collected during the practicum. The triangulated data were subjected to a multi-tiered collaborative content analysis. The findings showed that narrative-embedded observations helped student teachers organize and attach meaning to their early field experiences, and thus build on their self-awareness, critical thinking, and reflectivity for future classroom practices. We also reported how the participants reflected retrospectively, in the course of, and the posteriori of writing the classroom observational narratives. Through narrative knowledging, we offer a more nuanced approach to aiding student teachers’ early PD.

本文介绍了一种叙事探究方法，以了解土耳其国立大学英语学生教师的早期职业发展（PD）。借助叙事作为研究和局限性工具的双重功能，我们探讨了观察性叙事知识如何塑造学生教师早期的局限性轨迹。数据包括小组讨论，半结构化访谈，隐喻启发和伴随主要数据收集工具的非正式对话，即在实习期间收集的叙事框架。三角剖分的数据经过了多层协作内容分析。调查结果表明，通过叙述性观察，可以帮助学生教师组织和赋予他们早期田野经历的意义，从而增强他们的自我意识，批判性思维和对未来课堂实践的反思。我们还报告了参与者在撰写课堂观察性叙述的过程中以及回顾过程中的回顾性反映。通过叙述性知识，我们提供了更细微的方法来帮助学生教师的早期PD。