This paper explores the paths through which novice teachers in grades one to ten travelled during their first five years of teaching, in the context of a longitudinal research in Iceland. This study provides insights into their expectations, concerns and dilemmas, joys and difficulties, successes and failures, and how they endured the entire process – and in so doing, how they created and re-created their identity as teachers. In this paper, I will present how their professional identity developed during the five years of our research relationship. The research centers around the following key questions: 1) How do beginning teachers experience their first five years of teaching in Iceland? and how do they develop their embodied knowledge of creating and managing relationships with students, colleagues and parents, and, of creating a classroom community? 2) How do beginning teachers work with their images of the teacher they initially wanted to become, i.e. how are these images and identities created and re-created? and how does their personal practical knowledge develop through their first five years of experience in teaching? The aim of this study was to bring to light their learning and development; what hindered and what supported them. Another aim was to examine what kind of support novice teachers need during their early years of teaching. The theoretical framework of this qualitative study was both phenomenology and postmodern theory (Creswell, 1998, 2007; Kvale, 1996; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998), and the central analytical perspective was the philosophy of narrative inquiry, which shaped the research methodology and the methods used. The Canadian scholars Connelly and Clandinin, who have been among the most productive researchers in narrative educational research and writings, claim to have been the first to use the term narrative inquiry in the educational research field (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). Narrative inquiry is both a phenomenon that is studied and a method of study (Connelly and Clandinin, e.g. 1990, 2006; Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). In my research, I draw heavily on Connelly and Clandinin's ideas, terms and definitions regarding narrative inquiry (Connelly and Clandinin, e.g. 1990, 2006; Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Narrative inquiry has aspects in common with other types of qualitative inquiry such as the emphasis on the social in ethnography and the use of first-person experience and narrative in phenomenology. Narrative inquiry is the simultaneous exploration of what Connelly and Clandinin (2006) call the three commonplaces: Temporality, sociality and place – which they say specifies dimensions of an inquiry space, namely the “places” [sic] to direct one’s attention when doing a narrative inquiry. Additionally, they claim (2000) that this approach requires cooperation between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus. By using narrative inquiry the researcher adopts a particular view of human experience which can be seen as a gateway to the understanding of experience. Narrative inquiry is the study of “how humans make meaning of experience by endlessly telling and retelling stories about themselves that both refigure the past and create purpose in the future” (Connellly and Clandinin, 1988, p. 24). The most valuable way of looking more closely at people is through the stories they tell of their lives (Freeman, 1997). Consequently, the findings of this research were written in the form of comprehensive and detailed stories.

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