Mapping Narrative Rupture in Teachers' Professional Lives: A Recursive Process Framework and Research-Analytic Protoco
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Teachers can experience severe occupational strain while retaining a credible professional story, or lose that story's tenability without leaving teaching. This theoretical paper develops a framework for examining that distinction and the processes through which professional meaning is reconstructed. A purposive conceptual synthesis connects narrative identity, teacher identity, meaning-making, work motivation, sensemaking, sensegiving, and work-identity transition research. Sources are selected for definitional relevance, explanatory mechanisms, teacher-specific evidence, and comparison with adjacent constructs. Narrative rupture is specified as a consequential loss of tenability in an identity-central professional narrative attributed to acute or cumulative discrepancy. Four recursive analytic moments organise the framework: disruption, intensified individual and social sensemaking, organisational sensegiving and its reception, and attempts at reconstruction. Developmental, generative, material, and other participant-defined returns help identify what is at stake without constituting a universal motivational taxonomy. Six conditional propositions distinguish possible mechanisms from the proposed classification criteria. A seven-step qualitative protocol preserves chronology, records supporting and contrary evidence, examines rival explanations, and separates narrative condition from school transfer, professional retention, exit, and re-entry. Constructed examples illustrate the decisions without supplying empirical validation. The contribution is a teacher-focused integration and transparent analytic procedure whose reliability, discriminant value, and explanatory usefulness require longitudinal and comparative testing.
Institution: Vilnius Business College
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7214734626