Presentation
‘Reasons for entry’ as a heuristic to explore teacher identity development among preservice teachers
American Educational Research Association
(2010)
Abstract
This study focuses on student teachers' reasons for entering the profession in order to explore professional identity development. Reasons for entry, as a heuristic, highlights how who one is relates to who they hope to become through their choice of work. Greene (1978) asserted that the work we choose to do is a response to perceived deficiencies or possibilities in ourselves and in the world and "may be connected with our notion of what we want to make of ourselves, of the kinds of identity we want to create" (p. 26). In previous research, reasons for entry were found to be salient in teachers descriptions of their understandings about teaching, career goals, and sense-making of current experiences (Olsen, 2008; Sexton, 2008). This studys attention to how teachers understand, mediate, and enact their professional goals and reasons for entry elucidates ways that teacher development links personal experiences and future-oriented goals.
This research draws on Olsen's (in press) theoretical understanding of identity studies, which deepens "how we think about if, how, and under what circumstances we matter." Identity studies focuses on the dynamic and iterative processes of professional development as locally situated, tied to macro-structural dimensions of our lives (e.g. gender), embedded in, and represented by language. People are more than the mere accretion of characteristics, as there remains "an active, dynamic, shifting part of one's identity" (p. 17). It is this shifting part that makes identity studies so important for understanding teacher development as it points to the relationship among the teacher's self, their context, and others in that context. So, while reasons for entry appear to be salient for professional development, how a person understands and enacts these reasons should change over time in response to professional experiences and the local context. Employing a phenomenological approach to research, this study is a "systematic attempt to uncover and describe the structures, the internal meaning structures, of lived experience" (Van Manen, 1990, p. 10).
Using this model of teacher identity, with a focus on student teachers' reasons for entering the profession, I conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews with twelve math and science credential candidates enrolled in one California credential program. These data are part of a longitudinal project focused on the following research question: How do beginning math and science teachers develop their professional identities as they progress from being a student of teaching to a beginning teacher? For analysis, I employed discourse analytics such as indexicality and Gricean pragmatics (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Schiffrin, 2005). Analysis allowed me to identify, examine, and more deeply theorize the various identity components, processes, and relationships that are invoked by math and science teachers becoming early career professionals. The findings offer deeper ways to understand possibilities and constraints student teachers faced during teacher education and they highlight how teachers attempted to mediate those possibilities and constraints to enact work that is meaningful for the teachers and their future students.
Disciplines
Publication Date
May 3, 2010
Location
Denver, CO
Citation Information
Dena Sexton. "‘Reasons for entry’ as a heuristic to explore teacher identity development among preservice teachers" American Educational Research Association (2010) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/dena-sexton/8/