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In this paper [the authors] share the outcomes of a project that sought to take up Nutbrown's challenge to 'push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established methodologies' in early years research. [The authors] explore the value of auto-ethnographic storytelling, Lyotard's 'petit recit', to the processes of doing and learning about research in the context of practitioner education. [The authors] offer a rationale for the use of creative methods in (post?) professional learning and describe the process of working with identity boxes and symbolic objects, to produce a collection of auto-ethnographic narratives, the old wives' tales of the title, through which to explore practitioners' experiences of professional identity formation.

[The authors] consider the opportunities such methods offer for reflexive learning about practitioner positionality within the knowledge-making practices of research and attempt to (re)position [themselves] differently as writers and makers of research. Towards a conclusion [the authors] review and theorise meanings participant-researchers make about their career trajectories and proffer auto-ethnography as a dynamic modality for practitioner learning. [The authors] mobilise Patti Lather's notion of methodological proliferation to re-think practitioner education as a wild profusion of post-professional possibilities.

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