New Teachers as Emerging Adults

• In Event: Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Development for Urban Schools: From Preservice to Induction to Teacher Leadership

Abstract

In a major policy speech to the National Council for Teacher Education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2010) identified the “caliber of new teachers [as] a critical national priority.” Relying on research from a range of international studies (McKinnsey Report, 2007; Schleicher, 2011), Duncan emphasized that unless we find ways to recruit “top talent” to teaching—that is candidates who choose teaching over other prestigious career options such as law or medicine—we will continue to lag behind other countries who recruit top achievers to become teachers. This qualitative study uses Arnett’s work on emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2004) to investigate and analyze the experiences of undergraduates from highly ranked liberal arts colleges who participated in a month-long undergraduate Urban Teaching Fellows program where they were mentored by alumni from similar colleges. This study reports on how these teachers, who would be considered “promising talent,” processed the experience during and after their fellowship in regard to their aspirations.

Three themes emerged from the analysis of interviews, focus groups, and written reflections that can be understood as relating to the transition to emerging adulthood, which Arnett (Arnett & Tanner, 2006) theorizes as a new stage in human development, distinct from adolescence and adulthood, overlapping with both stages. For Arnett, the primary developmental project entails exploring various work possibilities and vocational identities.

First, the Fellows describe the immersion as providing clarity about how teaching involves the significant investment of personal meaning and self into the work (Hansen, 1994). They described moving from a naïve sense of teacher as cultural hero to a more nuanced understanding of teaching as a “way of living” (Huebner, 1990). As one Fellow said, “If I choose to teach I must understand that this will be my life.” For many Fellows, this sense of a budding vocational commitment contrasts with their prior work experience, which mostly involved summer retail or on campus work-study jobs that they viewed not as occupational preparation, but as a way to earn money. Second, despite their attraction to the promise of teaching as vocational work, they expressed anxiety about whether teaching would be compatible with what Arnett calls the “next stage of their life.” They articulated concerns about how teachers’ long hours and the profession’s low status and low salaries would impact their explorations in other domains important to emergent adults. Lastly, because emerging adulthood is viewed as a time for trying out unusual work or experimenting with vocational identity, short-term commitment programs, such as Teach for America and NYC Teaching Fellows, appealed to many of the Fellows, even as they articulated conceptual concerns that an influx of short-term teachers would be ineffective in schools and for urban youth. The responses of these aspiring teachers invites us to imagine developmentally appropriate pre-service and induction experiences that take into account the new teacher as an emerging adult.

Author

• Sam Intrator, Smith College