All the World's a Stage: Preservice Music Teacher Identity Construction Through Metaphor

• In Event: 44.084 - Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: 44.084-20 - Becoming Artist Music Teachers: Four Perspectives on Music Teacher Identity Construction

Abstract

The primary purpose of the descriptive case study was to investigate how preservice music teachers understand and describe their professional identity through the use of metaphor. Specific research questions were: a) How do preservice music education students express their beliefs about teaching and learning through metaphor?, b) What impact on identity construction do the mentors and the peer community have on the students as they engage within the authentic learning experience?, and c) How are student metaphors impacted over time through mentor relationships and authentic learning experiences?
Metaphors are an analogical tool used to describe what is unfamiliar with what is familiar to create a deeper understanding of the unknown (Lakeoff & Johnson, 1980; Quale, 2002). A metaphor may also assist in developing “a form of argument or genuine preference for something over another” (Saban, 2006, p. 300). Metaphors may serve to (a) illuminate the underlying values and belief systems a preservice teacher might hold (Cook-Sather, 2003), (b) understand the teaching profession (Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011), (c) illuminate how teachers perceive their image of professional self (Saban, 2004, 2006), and (d) serve as a powerful reflective tool for providing a deeper understanding of the professional self (Black & Halliwell, 2000; Cook-Sather, 2009).
Thirteen third-year instrumental methods course music education students used a personal metaphor as a vehicle to explore their professional identity construction. The metaphor work was embedded within an authentic learning pedagogical approach where PMT worked in a public school classroom, mentored by university faculty and cooperating public school teachers in order to apply their knowledge and explore their values and beliefs in action. Data sources included preservice teacher artifacts (reflections, selected pictures, teaching videos, lesson plans), interviews, and observation/field notes. My approach to the case study design was constructivist (Stake, 1995), as the stories the participants shared is embedded in the authentic learning context, the mentoring provided, and personal beliefs about teaching and learning (Baxter & Jack, 2008).
Once the PMT worked through designing a personal metaphor, they were placed in small groups. Communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) served as the theoretical framework for the preservice teachers to collaborate with their mentors and peers to discuss their teaching experiences, what it means to be music teachers, and share concerns about their own teaching. The authentic learning experience and mentoring goal for the university and cooperating teachers was to provide an environment where the preservice teachers could question their own assumptions and values about teaching and learning while taking personal responsibility for their professional growth and the musical growth of the students they were teaching.
The impact of mentoring within an authentic learning context appears to initially enrich the ways in which preservice teachers are able to articulate the details within their metaphor descriptions. Only one preservice teacher chose to change one metaphor for another, and all but one student shared concerns about the limits they discovered within their metaphor descriptions in capturing the complexities of teaching and becoming teachers.

Author

• Cynthia L Wagoner, East Carolina University