An Uneasy Fit: Teacher Identity, Best Practices, Public Expectation, and Schooling Circumstance

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Lives of Teachers: Teacher Identity

Abstract

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an ethnographic exploration of mathematics teaching experiences, amid political contestations over best practices, at a charter school for the gifted where expectations and anxieties run high. The study looks to the circumstances of teaching and the emotional-intellectual-biographical identities of teachers as learners to understand what directs and holds teachers in particular modes of practice. Informed by studies in attachment, the work seeks to disrupt deficit models of teachers and instead asks how teaching practice makes sense. A preliminary analysis suggests a connection between attachment patterns and classroom practice. Themes of “dichotomized pedagogy,” “student competition,” “never a dull moment,” and “people here are my greatest support” reveal the conflicted space that teachers navigate daily.

Author

• Lissa D'Amour, University of Calgary