Accountability Reforms, Social Justice, and "Bad Cat Food": One Literacy Teacher's First Year

• In Event: 43.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 43.078-1 - Identity, Self-Making, and Commitment Across Teaching Contexts

Abstract

Drawing on poststructural feminisms, this study explores how the emotions of a new teacher, Julie, entangled with her teaching and self-making during her first year teaching. Situated within a larger, longitudinal ethnographic study of teacher induction experiences, interview data centered Julie’s voice. We analyzed data by “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). (Re)viewing Julie’s experiences through poststructural feminist perspectives of emotion produced new understandings about how her first year was complicated by feelings of fear, guilt, and isolation and how her negotiations ultimately strengthened her beliefs. This speaks to ways teacher educators and researchers could prepare new teachers in building/maintaining community and in (re)framing discourses in contested spaces to talk about their practice, beliefs, and emotions.

Authors

• Susan Tily, The University of Texas at Austin

• Charlotte L. Land, Pennsylvania State University

• Jessica Cira Rubin, The University of Texas at Austin

• Erica Steinitz, The University of Texas at Austin