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We address the key aim of this special issue through a focus on teachers' self-reflection, in particular the construction and integration of personal and professional identities, drawing on data from two studies. The first is a case study of a male nursery teacher (from a study by Warin) which examines how dissonance is experienced in identities concerning status and gender and how it is resolved through a synthesis of class teaching with fathering. The second harnesses survey data (from the Teacher Status Project) of 'nearly qualified teachers' about to embark on their professional lives, and of practising teachers, in which we focus on their reasons for becoming a teacher, exploring discontinuities between actual and desired teacher identities and the transformations that take place over time. The data from the two studies emphasize the importance of 'technologies of the self' in order to develop teacher self-awareness. We support a shift in interpreting the meaning of reflective practice towards an emphasis on teachers' reflexive practice. We recommend that teachers be given opportunities and strategies for the active creation of expanded narratives of self, and identify examples of how this might be achieved.

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In so far as modern families subscribe to an ideal of democracy, then adolescence is a time in which the democratic ideal in the family becomes an object of explicit focus as parents and teenagers strive towards a renegotiation of their relative positions. Teenagers need to develop their adult identities and a sense of agency, while at the same time, parents who have invested both personally and financially in their children must reconsider this relationship and come to terms with the reality of the returns from that investment. Intimate relations imply both democracy and equality: in what Giddens (1992) calls the ‘pure relationship’, individuals continuously reevaluate the relationship in terms of the satisfactions which it delivers in their ‘project of the self’. This paper argues that the twin ideals of democracy and intimacy necessarily clash in parent-teenager relationships, resulting in a further complication of the negotiation processes already identified in previous research (Brannen, 1999; Brannen et al., 1994; Hofer et al., 1999).While both parents and their teenage children subscribe to the discourse of openness and honesty as the route to both intimacy and democracy, there are tensions within the concept of openness because both parties have opposing goals in the trading of information. For parents, information gain means the retention of power and control, while for teenagers, with-holding information from their parents ensures their privacy, power and identity.

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