Questioning the Problematic Nature of School Culture in Elementary Teacher Education (original) (raw)
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Teaching and Teacher Education , 2019
Dominant ideologies pervade school contexts and shape the ways in which normalcy and difference are constructed within education systems. Students with social identities positioned as different from the referent norm (e.g., disabled, non-white, non-binary, etc.) experience various interconnected forms of systemic oppression that relegate them to the physical and social margins of schools. Scholars in teacher education suggest that teacher preparation programs should weave together critical approaches to inclusive education to support teacher candidate understandings of dominant ideologies and their own identities mediate their interactions with students and colleagues. However, this work proves difficult because it requires challenging deeply embedded habits of mind and embrace new ways of viewing the world. Moreover, new teachers face resistance to inclusion as they enter practice contexts where exclusion and segregation are the norm. This paper explores how four graduates drew on their preparation experiences and personal histories to engage in identity development as they navigated the tensions between the inclusive messages of their program and their practice contexts.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2011
Background/Context Teacher preparation programs are built on knowledge, practices, habits of mind, and professional standards that teacher educators (TEs) intend teachers to possess. Some foundations are explicitly manifest in standards, mission statements, and policies, whereas others are embedded in coursework, field experiences, and social contexts that influence teacher candidates’ (TCs’) developing teacher identities. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study conceptualizes the process of working with TCs whose identity development trajectories pose troubling problems. We explore the question, How can TEs make informed, responsible, and compassionate decisions about intern identity development? To do so, we offer narrative accounts of three secondary teacher candidates moving along identity trajectories with varying degrees and types of difficulty. Our inquiry traced the construction of first-, second-, and third-person narratives of TCs who experienced “pro...
Journal of Education and Learning, 2013
The study uses teacher identity as a lens to explore how teachers make sense of their work and constitute professional identities in the often complex world of teaching and learning. Three teachers who completed the same teacher preparation program and taught in the same school district were observed and interviewed for the study in 2009-2010. A multiple case methodology was used to explore the question: How do teachers who go through the same teacher preparation program and teach in the same school district constitute their professional identities? Findings indicate that school and district mandates have a strong influence in shaping teacher identities because these mandates appeared to either limit or distract teacher reflective practices. It was found that teachers caught up in the logic of the mandated curricular and assessments were less likely to use constructivist frameworks to understand student perspectives or to connect with the lived experiences of their students. On the other hand, it was found if a teacher was engaged in critical inquiry about teaching and learning, that teacher was likely to use multiple assessment strategies to understand students, and was likely to engage student learning through open-ended, classroom conversations. We concluded that since a teacher is the single most important factor affecting student achievement, school districts should be forums for continuous teacher learning. The goal for such learning should be to create adaptive experts or-teachers who continually expand the breadth and depth of their expertise. Additionally, such learning should be both practice-centered and inquiry oriented.
Collaborating Towards Humanizing Pedagogies: Culture Circles in Teacher Educator Preparation
The New Educator, 2019
This paper describes how we, a group of 7 emerging teacher educators, took up a critical inquiry framework to collaboratively generate knowledge through dialogic reflection on practice across educational contexts. We participated in culture circles and teatro as a practice of teacher education that centers love and humanizing practice. Together throughout the semester, we engaged in problem-posing and dialogue in order to collectively problemsolve around a generative theme: Humanity is non-negotiable in teaching and teacher education. In this paper, we include our reflections on one dilemma of practice to illustrate ways to transform teacher education to include humanizing practices.
New teachers’ identity shifts at the boundary of teacher education and initial practice
International Journal of Educational Research, 2011
Recent literature in teacher education addresses the issue of identity as students learn to become teachers and undergo a changing sense of who they are as professionals (Freese, 2006; Hoban, 2007; Olsen, 2008). Teacher identity, a complex and dynamic phenomenon with links to the self and agency, combines both a personal and professional dimension, involving notions not only of Who am I? but also of Who am I as a teacher? and What does this identity mean in terms of the way I teach? Although student teachers may have a developing notion of who they are as teachers as they move through teacher education programs, the shift from the protected environment of such programs into initial practice in schools can be destabilizing and is a period of identity change worthy of investigation (Riopel, 2006). The influence of a school context has an effect on the often fragile identity of a newly formed teacher (Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006). Moving from a university community of student teachers to the community of a school as a new teacher implies multiple tensions as adaptations and adjustments to identity are necessitated or provoked. We understand this period as an intense identity experience, a time when the new school context causes a beginning teacher to question and perhaps reframe her developing identity. We are interested in the identity shifts in the boundary space represented by the period between learning to be a teacher and reaching the end of several months of initial practice; in other words, our focus is on the first months of initial practice. The study reported in this paper recognizes the importance of this shift into initial practice for the identity of teachers and
Pedagogies of Developing Teacher Identity
Research on student teacher learning has identified development of a professional identity as an inevitable focus in teacher education. Accordingly, many teacher education programs have come to include attention for the development of student teachers' professional identities, but not much research has been done on the (effects of) pedagogies that have such development as their goal. Pedagogies that aim at developing teacher identity share common elements, such as the view that developing a professional identity is an ongoing process and the view that developing a professional identity as a teacher unmistakably includes a combination of personal and professional (including contextual) aspects. This chapter describes pedagogies that focus particularly on the development of student teachers' and beginning teachers' professional identity, from different angles, but sharing the views as described above. First, we describe two pedagogies that have "key incidents" in student teachers' development as focus point. Second, we report on the "subject-autobiography," in which student teachers describe and develop how their identity is