Becoming a Teacher as a Hero's Journey: Using Metaphor in Preservice Teacher Education.

Abstract

Becoming a teacher is hard work. A sizable body of research indicates that student teaching internships or other field-based practica are a particularly difficult part of this process. Many preservice teachers have misconceptions about work of teachers and teaching (Cole & Knowles, 1993); when they begin their field placements they often feel disillusioned by contrast between their idealized images and realities of profession. As they experience myriad challenges of classroom life, preservice teachers often call into question ideas and skills they were taught in their university coursework (Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1981). Further, numerous stressors linked with student teaching--expectations, role clarification, conformity, time, evaluation, assignments, peer discussions, feedback (MacDonald, 1993)--contribute to making field experiences arduous and overwhelming. One of our tasks as teacher educators is to educational contexts and opportunities that support and sustain our students as they navigate these difficult times. One successful strategy toward this end is use of metaphor (Bullough, 1991; Bullough & Stokes, 1994; Carter, 1990; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Dickmeyer, 1989; Marshall, 1990; Provenzo, McCloskey, Kottkamp & Cohn, 1989; Stofflett, 1996; among others). In this article, I share results of a recent study that explored ways in which hero's journey metaphor offered support to a cohort of preservice elementary school teachers during their first field placement experience. Because the hero is a universal ideal that helps people think about their lives in a more profound and creative (Noble, 1994, p. 30) and because hero's journey's emphasizes transformation and growth, hero's journey is an appropriate and potentially powerful metaphor for nascent teachers. This study revealed that hero's journey metaphor was helpful to students in a range of ways. However, I also found that many participants who enjoyed thinking of their experience as a hero's journey were resistant to image of hero. I will describe benefits my students experienced as a result of using hero's journey metaphor as a way to view their field placement experience, examine contradictions in students' responses to this metaphor, and conclude by discussing implications of these findings for teacher education program development. Using Metaphor in Preservice Teacher Education For several years I taught an elementary classroom organization and management course at a large research university in Southwestern United States. In conjunction with this practicum course, which met weekly and covered topics such as classroom environments, discipline, lesson and unit planning, professionalism, and so on, my students would spend 20 hours per week as interns in elementary school classrooms (grades 1-5) in a socio-culturally diverse urban school district for a period of 10 weeks. Concurrent with this practicum and internship, students were enrolled in four other methods courses. This was always a demanding and difficult semester for my students: they faced daunting task of transforming themselves from college students into professionals as they simultaneously learned teaching strategies and dealt with practical and logistical challenges of field placements. In an attempt to support my preservice teachers during their challenging internship semester, in Spring of 1999 I elected to modify my classroom organization and management class to take advantage of power of metaphor. Because metaphor allows preservice teachers to create meaning in ambiguous, complex situations such as those commonly found in classrooms (Provenzo, McCloskey, Kottkamp & Cohn 1989, p. 52), I expected that metaphor would offer my students a powerful way to understand their field experiences and to explore their roles in those experiences. …

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