Becoming a social science teacher: the meaning-making journey through narratives of purpose

Purpose This study examines how experienced teachers narratively reconstruct their decision to enter and remain in a contested, marginalized curriculum subject. It foregrounds the retrospective, culturally situated and identity-laden dimensions of teacher motivation that existing literature has undertheorized. Bruner's Acts of Meaning (1993) is used as a theoretical lens. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on data from 28 in-service social science (SS) teachers recruited through purposive maximum variation sampling across school types and boards of affiliation in Bengaluru, India. A qualitative methodology within a constructivist paradigm was employed. Data were inductively coded and thematically analysed using Bruner’s (1993) lens as the interpretative framework. Findings Five themes emerged from the data. Across all five themes, meaning-making emerged as an active, ongoing and culturally embedded process rather than a fixed property of individuals. Teachers engaged in retrospectively reframing unplanned or imposed entries into coherent stories of professional purpose and subject belonging. Originality/value This study demonstrates that studying motivation after years of professional experience yields a fundamentally different and richer object of inquiry. It extends Bruner's (1993) work to teacher identity as an analytical field. It also situates teacher narratives within the specific structural conditions of SS education in the Global South using empirical evidence.