Samenvatting

This article discusses how professional identity, conceptualised as 'stories professionals tell about
themselves at a specific moment in a specific context', can be portrayed to address its complexity as
a dynamic, constructed, cognitive-emotional, multi-voiced, and dialogical concept. In order to
construct a narrative-biographical method, eight teacher educators reflected on their professional
development, using the self-confrontation method, resulting in self-narratives. The findings of the
study indicate teacher educators' meaningful experiences can be portrayed in a systematic way using
identity components such as job motivation, task perception, task-feeling, self-image and selffeeling.
This method can reveal a personal or professional theme to further educators' development,
focusing both on a content level as well as an emotional level. These results were illustrated by one
teacher educator's story. Finally, suitability of this method was discussed for reflection purposes in
teacher education and research goals.