Community and conversation: tackling beginning teacher doubt and disillusion

Margaret Somerville has suggested that a new methodology of postmodern emergence might allow researchers to disrupt the taken-for-granted and provide fresh insight into familiar problems. One such familiar problem is the doubt and disillusion many early-career teachers experience, both during their teacher education and in their first years. Attrition rates are high. This paper, co-authored by two teacher educators and two early-career secondary teachers, draws on Somerville’s ideas by creating multiple modes of creative expression in order to allow fresh insight to emerge from the relationship between the multiple parts of the paper. Different readers will draw their own conclusions from the rich material presented, but for the authors the research reminds us of the regenerative potency of relationships and conversations in which doubts and disillusion can be expressed and heard. The implications for teacher education, at a time when direct face-to-face time with students is being eroded, are explored.     

The uncertainty and fragility of learning to teach: a Britzmanian lens on a student teacher story

This paper turns the kaleidoscopic lens of Professor Deborah Britzman’s writings on a student teacher story of learning to teach. It begins by briefly setting the context for the research. It then explains the study’s ontological and epistemological focus on experience and how student teacher and researchers create expressions of experience through an interpretative process. This leads to the design for interpretation in this study and to an explanation of why the work of Britzman became part of the interpretative layering for understanding student teacher Ciara’s texts. It continues by explicating Britzman’s concept of ‘struggle for voice’ as a metaphor for learning to teach and briefly makes comparison with the work of Bakhtin and his concept of the dialogical imagination. It then presents the layered interpretation in the form of indicative excerpts in a chronological story. Finally it focuses on the salient and pervading theme of affect and offers a brief commentary on its significance in initial teacher education and the need for developing an understanding for the feeling world of learning to teach.