How Reasons for Entry into the Profession Illuminate Teacher Identity Development

Abstract

That which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered stars into space.... Yet if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing --Kahlil Gibran, 1923 As teacher educators better understand the recurved, holistic, and often deeply embedded ways in which teachers learn, they can better support meaningful professional preparation that serves teachers' careers, the students they teach, and the profession of teaching as a whole. This article uses the ecologically minded teacher identity as a useful analytic for understanding beginning teacher development. I am guided by a view of teacher development as a continuum rather than discrete, linear parts. That is to say that teacher recruitment, preservice preparation, inservice professional development, and teacher retention may be chronologically sequenced but, epistemologically, they are intertwined and continually loop back and forth to influence each other in mutually constitutive ways. Teacher development is circular even as it is also forward-moving: a teacher is always collapsing the past, present, and future into a complex melange of professional beliefs, goals, memories, and predictions while enacting practice. This article, then, considers how teachers rely on embedded understandings of and for themselves as teachers, which derive from personal and prior experiences as well as professional and current ones. These embedded understandings shape how teachers interpret, evaluate, and continuously collaborate in the construction of their own early development. Drawing on data collected from six first-year teachers from the same California university teacher education program, the article examines how multiple components of a teacher's professional identity mediate one another as each becomes intertwined within (and organized around) the teacher's understandings of teaching, teacher practices, and career plans. To present this analysis, I focus on ways a teacher's reasons for entering the profession illuminate teacher identity and influence teacher development. What is Teacher Identity? I have adopted a view of teacher identity which combines related ideas from social psychology, philosophy, and sociolinguistics. (1) Drawing from Mead (1964/1932), Bakhtin (in Holquist, 1990), and Holland et al (1998), I locate teacher identity inside a cultural studies of the person. This angle of inquiry departs from traditional psychological frames of identity, which treat individuals as autonomous, purposeful, and fixed. It also avoids the over-emphasis on macrostructural treatments of race, class, and gender which dominate many modernist sociological and anthropological framings. Instead, the lens I use derives from recent inroads made by sociohistorical perspectives such as social and critical theory (Bourdieu, 1991; Holquist, 1990; Lave & Holland, 2001), phenomenology (Heidegger, 1997/1927), and sociolinguistics (Gee, 1992, 2000; Linde, 1993). This sociocultural model of identity considers that people are both products of their social histories, and--through things like hope, desperation, imagining, and mindfulness--move themselves from one subjectivity to the next, from one facet of their identity to another, and can in some limited sense choose to act in certain ways considered by them to be coherent with their own self-understandings. Applied to teachers, this view highlights both the constraints/opportunities on a teacher deriving from personal histories and also the actual agency any teacher possesses. There are several entrances into the construct of teacher identity. Picture a room with many doors, or consider Diagram 1 that follows. Each of the boxes acts as an opening into the holistic, circular mix of how any teacher's past, present, and future are linked; how the personal and the professional are in many ways inextricable; how context and self interact; and how each teacher component mediates (and is mediated by) the others. …

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