A Meta-Synthesis of the Achievements of the Narrative Inquiry Program for Teachers and Student Teachers

Narrative inquiry is one of the approaches to the professional development of teachers and student teachers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the achievements of the narrative inquiry program for teachers and student teachers. This study was conducted using a Meta-Synthesis method. Based on the seven-step model, first, the research question is set; and next, the researcher systematically examines the articles published in scientific journals, public sources, and reputable sites, based on specific keywords. The third step is to search and review related texts. At this stage, according to the purpose of the research, related articles are selected and other articles are eliminated. The fourth step is to extract the information from the articles and the fifth step is analyzing and combing the qualitative findings. In the fifth step, the findings are coded and classified. The sixth step is quality control and the seventh step is to provide the findings. An agreement between the two coders is used to control the quality. Based on the above steps, in this study, due to the limitations of internal researches, external databases (Science Direct, Google Scholar, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Eric, and Emerald) were studied. The time period for the publication of studies were from 1980 to 2017. In the first step, the databases were examined using specific vocabulary and keyword phrases, all articles and texts were collected based on the relationship title of article with them. 150 documents (articles, books and dissertations) were found, that out of this number, 60 documents were selected as the final corpus according to the research questions. The documents that did not relate to the questions were removed and finally, the most relevant documents were identified. The findings were coded, categorized and themed. As a result of synthesizing the findings, two main categories and 15 concepts were extracted. After conducting the Meta-Synthesis research, the results of the study showed that: 1) the narrative inquiry allows teachers and student teachers to change their professional identity and become creative, productive, and researcher (by changing the role of the teacher as the creator and maker of knowledge, changing the role of the teacher to the designer and maker of the curriculum, Changing the role of the teacher to the researcher teacher; 2) the narrative inquiry allows teachers to develop their knowledge, skills and professional attitudes (through communication between theory and practice, developing of comprehension, getting teacher knowledge, comprehending teaching, solving problems of teaching, planning for the future based on past experiences, achieving meaningful learning, engaging and success of learners, encouraging self-reflection and helping to professional learning, identifying and understanding people's experiences, developing attitudes, and developing general personal skills).