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Abstract
The literature on history education in the United States suggests that history teaching was and still is dominated by traditional instruction methods that have persisted for well over 100 years. Some social studies teachers defy that tradition. They use ambitious approaches and resources to create student-centered learning experiences that enable self-authored, inquiry-based learning. The question is how such teachers have developed their goals, purposes, and approaches to teaching. In this study, three ambitious, experienced high school history teachers tell stories of transformative learning experiences that significantly shaped the purposes for their work, the goals they had for their students, and the methods they used in the classroom. They also talk about personal identities they consciously bring into the classroom and how these identities shape their goals and their practice. Transformative learning theory and the concept of identity was used to analyze these experiences and identities. This work contributes to the literature on teacher socialization and teacher education by giving voice to ambitious history teachers and making an argument for a more complex representation of teachers’ personalities and learning experiences in research. In addition, it calls on researchers to develop a better understanding of the experiences teachers remember as important, meaningful, influential, life-changing, or even transformative, and how these experiences have shaped their identities and practice. The findings suggest that transformative learning and personal identities can serve as fertile soil for the growth of teaching goals, purposes, and approaches that aid ambitious teaching. Some transformative learning experiences can even initiate the development of specific identities that a teacher then consciously brings into the classroom and purposefully enacts through her instructional decisions.