From the Reason to the Nature of Being a Teacher: Life-Exploration Based on Participatory Autobiography in the Context of Teaching and Education

The present study aims at exploring the reason for entering voluntarily into the teaching profession as well as representation of its nature in the context of life-world and from the viewpoint of student-teacher. To achieve this goal, we used the method of participatory autobiography, and the MAXQDA software for analysis of qualitative data to analyze the autobiographies. According to the results, we may classify the students’ motivation for entering the teaching profession in four types as follows:  “choosing a certain lifestyle”, “occupational privileges”, “encouraging one’s associates”, and “social function”. Similarly, the findings show that the nature of being a teacher is composed of four concepts of “love”, “teaching”, “educating”, and the “art of establishing relationship”. These findings show that recognizing the nature of being a teacher in the eyes of the volunteers and restudying the reasons and factors effective in entering the teaching profession must be considered and investigated by those responsible for education system.