Let's Talk About the Bridge: Sustaining Teacher Identity Past Induction Through Narrative

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Identity Exploration for Humanizing Pedagogy in Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper/roundtable focuses on facilitating connections between the experiences of preservice and inservice teachers--what we call ‘the bridge.’ For decades now, newly inducted inservice teachers have reported feeling burned out and fed up within their first few years (Friedman & Reynolds, 2011). Teacher education should share stories of novice and expert inservice teachers’ experiences transitioning from preservice to inservice teacher to provide this condition a voice and teach experience by proxy (Barone, 2001; Bruner, 1986). We argue that these stories have the potential to aid teaching’s unnatural attrition rate (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011) and keep young teachers in their classrooms. To expose these findings, the authors conducted a collaborative discourse analysis on two individually-performed studies on teacher identity development and embodiment.

Authors

• Taylor Norman, Georgia Southern University

• Janet M. Alsup, Purdue University