The focus of this study is an overview of using biographical approaches to teacher development via story telling. In the past two decades, stories or narratives have been used increasingly either as a way of learning or as a research method, namely "narrative inquiry", in educational practice and educational research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, et al., 2006; Craig, 2007; Elbaz-Luwisch, 1997; Olson, 1995; Schwarz, 2001; Zhao & Poulson, 2006). Story and narrative are very often used interchangeably to refer to actual accounts of experiences of pre-service teachers, teachers or teacher educators, shared via written or oral language (Jalongo, Isenberg, & Gerbracht, 1995). In this study, we reviewed and analysed the arguments and findings of empirical projects and exploratory studies on teachers’ practical knowledge and teacher development published in peer-reviewed international journals of teacher education both in European contexts as well as in other part of the world during the last 10 years, addressing the following research questions: 1. Which concepts and theories are used to support the idea of taking teacher stories as teacher knowledge and way of knowing? 2. How is the approach of teacher stories integrated into concepts of teacher professional development? How does story telling or narrative inquiry impact on teacher learning and teaching practice? 3. What are the main arguments in the findings? What are the problems or challenges to be addressed by future research?

We confined our search for the relevant literature to the period from 1999 to 2008 because this decade indicates an increasing number of this type of articles in key educational journals, especially a big jump since 2005. We searched the relevant key words ( e.g. teacher story or stories, narrative and knowledge) in the databases of ERIC, ISI web of knowledge, Science Direct, and JSTOR, which cover most of key educational journals. From the search result of relevant articles (N=196), we further selected those studies (N= 61) either using story/narrative as way of accessing and interpreting teaching practice or as a research method to study teacher knowledge and professional learning. We then categorized these studies and analysed them to address the research questions.

Initial analysis of these data suggests that 1) story telling has been used increasingly as an effective tool to help pre-service teachers, teachers, and teacher educators to understand their experiences, construct knowledge about teaching and acknowledge diverse voices in education; 2) narrative inquiry as a research methodology could present vividly teachers' experiences and reveal powerfully constraints, enablements, tensions in the process of obtaining in-depth understanding their experiences, identity and knowledge in rich contexts; 3) however, it lacks theoretical framework either in using stories/narratives as way of teacher learning or in analysing data. The findings of this study will extend our understanding about how stories/narratives or narrative inquiry are used in the field of teacher education, and the relevance for pre-service and in-service training. This study will also highlight the challenges of using autobiographical approaches in educational research and future research needs both in European and other contexts.