The primary objective of this study is to retrospectively reconstruct the career path of primary teachers' professional development (Huberman 1992). Special attention is paid to factors related to professional development, such as critical events or turning points in the course of one's career. The subjective views of teachers regarding their professional self are construed and categorized with the use of Kelchterman's (1993) interpretational framework of the professional self. A teacher's experiences are related to the physical and institutional context of one's own school or work community, which has its own special characteristics (Kalaoja & Pietarinen). In a larger sense, contextuality is related to that connection which forms between the social, cultural and inner world of experience of the teacher. In previous studies, it has been noted that teachers in rural schools do not consider themselves to be equal in terms of professional respect compared with their colleagues in towns or parish villages. The size and the location of the school has also been found to be connected with an overall willingness to develop professionally (Merilainen 1999). A second objective of this study was to understand the choices made by a teacher in her/his different career stages and the significance of these choices to his/her professional development. At which stage of one's career does the teacher possibly choose an active or a passive career path and what are those critical (inner and outer) factors within the context of a small school that guide this teacher's choice? The target group of this case study consisted of the neighbouring municipalities of Joensuu in the area of North Karelia. The case schools studied (6) were all rural schools with 1-3 teachers. At least one of the teachers had to be experienced with a minimum of 19 years of teaching experience. This study exploited a method typical of narrative research with retrospective drawing and writing tasks, after which further data was compiled by in-depth interviews in order to construct the professional self and to interpret the factors related to choices made in the past - present - future dimension. The preliminary results are based on the teachers' life-stories and on the tentatively construed factors affecting their career choices (active - passive). Keywords: primary teacher, professional development, professional career, stage theory approach, small rural school