Considering work on curriculum as biographical text and on the sociology of professions, we explore Greek-Cypriot elementary teachers’ sense of professionalism (Hargreaves, 2010; Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). The analysis is in relation to their teacher education (initial and post-graduate) (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999), as construed in their life histories, across four cohorts that correspond to different periods in the last 40 years in the Republic of Cyprus. Life history interviews were conducted as a three-step process combining interviewing and reporting back to each of the 28 study participants, to construct their life histories (Goodson, 2008), but also providing the basis for cross-case analyses within and across teacher cohorts. These were complemented with the collection and analysis of documented evidence circulated around critical or significant time periods, enabling contextual interpretations. The four cohorts corresponded to each of the four most recent decades with graduates from: the late 1970s-early 80s; the late 1980s-early 1990s; the years between 1996-2003; and the early 2010s-2015. The data were coded through a combination of productive and inductive techniques, and in this analysis we draw on the codes of “studies-initial education and other studies”, “social status of profession/teachers” and “teacher professional role”. Analysing these teachers’ life histories, through an inter-generational lens, brought forth some notable changes and constants in how teachers’ sense of professionalism was construed vis-à-vis particular disciplinary understandings for their studies and profession. Changing reasons for entering the profession and pursuing additional qualifications within or beyond education intersected both with institutional and other social changes, and with different types of professionalism (e.g. a profession of practice vs of science/theory or reflection). The latter also involved a key tension between teachers valuing general pedagogic preparation for elementary schools (polydynamos daskalos) and teachers increasingly valuing university qualifications on special didactics, as well as a tension between qualifications related to increased status within the profession and those related to other academic-personal interests, often beyond the profession. Recognizing the importance of the personal in the professional and of the contextual in both, we construct a history “from below” as a lens through which to understand the middle ground: what lies in-between the macro-level of institutional (teacher education) policy and discourse, and the micro-level of practice in the classroom. This study thus calls for attention to the production of local meanings as a means for understanding the historicity and topology of teacher education and professionalism.

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