This paper explores the use of ethnographic biography as a source of information and reflection for student teachers. Ethnographic methods combine observation of a subject's teaching environment or context, examining the present rather than the past. Information can then be made available to student teachers in need of a personal viewpoint on teaching to complement that which they learn in school. By offering student teachers the opportunity to make biographies of other teachers about their shared profession, not only they but experienced teachers as well can discover patterns of experience in relation to school culture, thereby enabling novices to take a more realistic view of teaching. The study described here is a model offered to student teachers in Fribourg (Switzerland) near their final semester of course work. It is a student-centered approach to critical ethnography that reveals biographical dimensions of both the expert teachers who are the focus of the ethnographic research and the student teachers who are conducting the research. The resulting narratives reveal common concerns, anxieties, sorrows, prejudices, and presuppositions, and they offer a way of bringing more context into student teachers' teaching curriculum. (Contains 45 references.) (LL)