The purpose of this article is to review and present the significance and challenges of longitudinal narrative research in studies of teachers' experiences, focusing on the relationship between time and human experience. There is a lack of articles that theoretically describe the connection between longitudinal narrative research, time, and empirical analysis, and, according to authors McKibben and Breheny (2023), there are tensions between the theoretical formulation of narrative time and the practical application of longitudinal narrative research. Although these authors conducted a literature analysis in the field of longitudinal narrative research, attempting to review and reduce the "tensions," the analysis was carried out in the health sciences field. Therefore, it is important to expand the discourse on this issue within the field of education.

With the establishment of social constructivism theory, which asserts that humans are shaped through social experiences, narrative research in social studies (including education) is gaining increasing popularity, as is its central idea that it is through storytelling that meaning is given to experience (Goodson and Gill, 2011; Moen, 2006). In order to better understand socio-cultural processes, this methodology is frequently used to study teachers' experiences (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Goodson, 2014).

Experience, like stories, is constantly reshaped by new experiences, so the process of reflection is ongoing, and conclusions are not final (McKibben, Breheny, 2023; Moen, 2006). A told story is temporary; it seems to separate from the storyteller and takes on a life of its own, as retelling it would make it different. Therefore, the story takes on a depersonalized value. For this reason, longitudinal narrative research, as a methodology, becomes multi-layered and raises the question: can the stories of the same individual's experiences, spread over time, be combined into one narrative, and how? Perhaps after some time, the teacher’s story will have a new narrative influenced by more recent experiences, contradicting the earlier interpretation of the same story? Is it meaningful to conduct longitudinal narrative research when the most recent interpretation is closest to the storyteller's identity and conclusions from their experiences? The past-present-future and the temporal arrangement of narratives allow one to observe how new experiences shape identity. All of this imposes additional demands on the researcher: “The non-linear nature of narrative time becomes entangled in the linear time of longitudinal narrative research.” (McKibben & Breheny, 2023)

This article aims to explore how the relationship between time and narrative is interpreted and analyzed in empirical research that uses longitudinal narrative research as a methodology.

This study is a theoretical investigation that utilizes a scoping review of related literature without adhering to strict guidelines (Arksey and O’Malley 2005). This approach was chosen because there are not many longitudinal narrative studies on teachers' experiences (both work and life), and they are difficult to find due to the use of very different keywords, with the term "longitudinal" not always being applied. Part of the research method involved exploratory searching based on primary article sources and citations, thereby creating a "networked" search of sources. The found empirical studies were analyzed in terms of time and narrative construction aspects, with key themes, issues, perspectives, and solutions being identified.

Narrative analysis in longitudinal narrative research requires researchers to address various challenges, such as participant engagement over time and the interpretation of evolving stories. A review of empirical studies revealed that authors choose different strategies to describe the relationship between time and experience. In some studies, this is mentioned in the methodology section, but the multi-layered nature of time is often overlooked in the analysis of results. In other longitudinal studies, attention is given to the impact of the temporal arrangement of the story on experience, but interpretative constraints are maintained. In conclusion, it can be stated that there are methodological tensions and differing approaches to the relationship between time and narrative in the application of longitudinal narrative research.

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