Section archive - Beginning Teachers

In this essay, the author, a teacher educator in Texas, reflects on an encounter with a first-year Latina teacher, who has decided to leave the profession. Despite successfully learning and applying critical pedagogy, the first-year teacher finds herself isolated and frustrated, stuck between a societal push for standardized success and her own desire to nurture transformation among her students. In listening to first-year teacher's experiences, the author grapples with his own responsibilities as a teacher educator.

Drawing from a larger study of teacher professional identities, this article explores how two beginning early childhood educators talk about what it means to teach. The article focuses on how these novice teachers position themselves, and are positioned, by their understandings of the 'child'. Using critical discourse analysis as a way of examining interview data, the author discusses how a discourse of the 'normal' child constructs particular identity positions for children and the adults who work with them.

This study focused on four preservice teacher candidates who were completing a yearlong internship at a Midwestern university in the United States. In their courses, the interns were learning to facilitate interactive discussions in English language arts. The authors explored how the interns' perceptions of their self-selected audience influenced what they noticed, talked about, and learned as they constructed a video case about their teaching. All interns gained insights about their teaching as they constructed their case. Implications for teacher education and future research directions are discussed.

During the course of an Initial Teacher Education programme, beginning teachers develop strong professional relationships. This study investigates the nature of these webs of relationships as networks, from a teacher's ego-centric perspective. Three case studies, set within a wider sample of 11 secondary school science teachers leaving one UK university's PostGraduate Certificate in Education, were studied. The focus of the paper is on how the teachers used others to help shape their sense of belonging to this, their new workplace. The paper develops ideas from network theories to argue that membership of the communities are a subset of the professional inter-relationships teachers utilise for their professional development.