Developing Practices in Multiple Worlds: The Role of Identity in Learning to Teach.

Recently, researchers and policymakers have begun to question the role of professional education in learning to teach. This inquiry reflects skepticism about the contributions of teacher education, which is, in turn, fueled by popular ideas about the work of teaching: teachers are born not made, or that real learning begins once novices arrive in the classroom (Britzman, 2003). Despite its sometimes dubious reputation, teacher education has an undeniable economic value, as legislation demanding highly qualified teachers presses on schools and districts to recruit candidates who are credentialed by the programs in question. But what, exactly, are the contributions of teacher education to teachers' eventual practice? Our study takes up the challenge of understanding the role of teacher education in learning to teach by connecting novice teachers' experiences in pre-service education with their eventual practice. Through a longitudinal person-centered ethnography, we have been following 8 secondary teachers as they advance through various stages of their education, starting in a progressive, university-based teacher credentialing program, into their student teaching, and, eventually, their induction years in the profession. Four of our interns specialized in mathematics and 4 in social studies. They varied in their subject preparation, reasons for entering the teacher education program, prior education and work experience. In this article we explain how a conceptual framework of teacher identity helps us understand the variations in interns' learning in the first stages of their formal education. We observed our eight participants over their time in the teacher education program (TEP), including their work in courses and in their field placements. In-depth participant interviews accompanied many of the observations, along with interviews with their cooperating teachers, university supervisors, and university instructors. Our goal in data collection was to understand the interns' learning from a situative perspective--that is, to understand the complex social organization that shapes learning, including the learners, teachers, curricula, and the social environments in which they come together (Greeno, 2006). To do so, we needed to capture the ways in which the TEP constituted learning environments for the interns, as well as their individual ways of interacting with those environments. Conceptualizing Identity and Learning in Teacher Education In this article, we explore the relationship between novice teachers' identities and their learning during their pre-service training, illustrating the way that identity shapes and is shaped by their learning. In keeping with our goal to understand learning from a situative perspective, we developed a conceptual framework that relies on constructs that would allow us to remain sensitive to both the individuals we were following and the teaching worlds they met. Identity, as an analytic construct, provided access to both individuals' dispositions and the environments they encountered. Because accounts of identity necessarily provide for the description of individuals, it helps us see the people we are trying to understand. At the same time, identities are constructed through culturally available descriptors, narratives, and archetypes, embedding and linking the individuals in the contexts around them. We frame identity development and learning as arising out of the interns' interactions with various figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998)--the socially-constructed roles, meaning systems, and symbols of the cultural contexts they encountered. Following Holland et al. (1998), we conceptualize individual agents as operating within their various figured worlds by asserting and receiving different identities. Identity refers to the way a person understands and views himself, and is often viewed by others, at least in certain situations--a perception of self that can be fairly constantly achieved. …