Stories we teach by: intersections among faculty biography, student formation, and instructional processes

Becoming a professional who embodies certain dispositions is known as identity formation. Little research has explored what intentions educators hold for student identity formation or how such intentions influence their teaching. Nine faculty members (all female) in an occupation-centered curriculum were interviewed and observed over 8 weeks. Data were analyzed primarily through narrative writing and data matrixes. Ultimately, educators in this study taught who they were; each personified an implicit curriculum, which conveyed the kind of people students were to become and the ways of knowing they were to adopt through the culture, artifacts, rituals, and modes of communication within a program. In the formation of self-defining professionals who embody occupational therapy's ethos, equal attention is needed to the biographical experiences of faculty members, to thoughtful design of the implicit curriculum, and to the ways of knowing portrayed to students every day in the classroom.