Negotiating Discourses of Learning to Teach: Stories of the Journey from Student to Teacher

I don't think I am the teacher I'd hoped to be yet. I would like to be but because everything's so new, I feel like most days I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing ... I didn't realize how hard it would be! (Erica: first-year teacher) Becoming a teacher is a complex, messy, and sometimes unsettling process. It is a time when one's past, present, and future are set in dynamic tension (Britzman, 1991). It is important for those in teacher education, as well as policy makers and educators, to understand this complicated process if we are to support beginning teachers. (1) Beginning teachers leave the profession at alarming rates. On average, nearly 50 percent of teachers leave the profession all together within their first five years (Smith & Ingersoll, 2004). With current policy discussions around alternative routes to teacher certification, there has also been debate about the impact of traditional pre-service teacher education. Additionally, there are frequent statements by beginning teachers about teacher education being inadequate, idealistic, and out of touch with reality. This article explores what it is like to become an elementary teacher in today's educational climate in which standardization and accountability increasingly influence what happens in classrooms across the country. Specifically, this article, in which a student teacher's story is analyzed and restoried, reveals the tensions involved in this transitional time of becoming a teacher. Part of a larger, longitudinal study designed to follow nine participants from teacher education through student teaching and into their first-year classrooms, this article focuses on one of those teachers, Erica (pseudonym), as she makes the transition from student to teacher. It illuminates the varying discourses student teachers must navigate as they determine what good literacy teaching and learning means to them. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the various challenges we face in university teacher education programs and K-12 schools, as well as some possibilities for how we might better support student teachers, particularly those operating in reductive classrooms and forced to implement standardized curriculum. Review of the Literature Figured Worlds When you close your eyes and imagine "school," what do you see? A teacher standing at the front of a classroom full of students each with his or her hand in the air? Groups of students working together to solve a problem? Students gathered around on a carpet as a teacher reads aloud? The image you create is a reflection of your experiences with and ideas about schooling. It is a snapshot of your figured world of schooling. A figured world (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 2001) is a "socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others" (p. 52). In order to interpret student teachers' experiences becoming teachers, it is important to understand their figured worlds(s) of schooling. This term is tentatively pluralized as most student teachers' figured worlds of schooling are not fixed. Rather, as they engage in becoming teachers, they encounter and traverse multiple figured worlds. These "as if" worlds are significant "as a backdrop for interpretation" (Holland et al., 2001, p. 54). They provide the context of meaning and action. Before a prospective teacher enters a formal teacher education program, he/she already brings with him/her over 13,000 hours of experience as a student in the classroom, what Lortie (1975) terms the "apprenticeship of observation." In addition to this experience, motivations for entering teaching, the type of preparation program one chooses, and incoming knowledge and other life experiences are just a few of the many elements that typically influence pre-service teacher learning. …