In the Midst of Becoming Teachers: Storying Second- and Third-Year Teacher Identities

• In Event: Negotiating Identities in the Transitions of Early Career Teachers: International Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives:
In this session we propose to present the results of a study of the experiences of second and third year teachers who graduated from an Alberta university. We propose to attend to the implications of such a framing as we consider teacher education, both preservice and inservice.

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework:
We adopt a narrative framing of identity through attending to the early career teachers’ experiences as they are lived out through personal and professional landscapes. This narrative framing attends to the temporal and place dimensions of teacher experience and identity.

Methods, Techniques, Modes of Inquiry:
We designed a semi-structured interview protocol based on the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space (temporality, sociality, place (s)). We also worked with the structure of asking each participant to sketch a time line that stretched backward from their present work as a teacher to their early experiences in early landscapes through their schooling, teacher education and first and second years of teaching. We also asked them to imagine their forward looking stories. We engaged 40 second and third year teachers in semi-structured interviews and then engaged in exploring what we could understand of the teachers’ unfolding identities.

Data Sources, Evidence, Objects or Materials:
Forty semi-structured interviews with 40 second and third year teachers in Alberta, Canada.

Results:
We will present the results using both illustrative narrative accounts of the teachers plus simple descriptive statistics.

Scholarly Significance:
Approaching teacher attrition from the perspective of teacher identity has radical implications for teacher education, professional development and induction. Most salient, the research compels us to consider how to sustain rather than simply retain teachers. The shift demands that we listen closely to teachers when they talk about their lives, in which they are always more than teachers. Seeing teachers as people in the midst of complex and unfolding identities and lives yields a better understanding of how schools and schools of education might better sustain them.

Authors

• Lee Mason Schaefer, University of Regina

• Julie Sharon Long, University of Alberta

• D. Jean Clandinin, University of Alberta

• Sheri Wnuk, The University of Arizona

• Eliza Anne Pinnegar, University of Alberta

• Sue McKenzie-Robblee, University of Alberta

• Pamela A. Steeves, University of Alberta

• C. Aiden Downey, Emory University