Pre-service Learning and the (Gentle) Distruption of emerging teaching identity

Abstract

The application of ‘identity’ to analyses of teaching is not new. However in this chapter, the authors propose that the construct has as yet unexploited potential to refresh current theories about teacher learning. They discuss how notions of identity, when integrated with social learning theory, might offer fresh insights for both research and practice. And the authors illustrate this proposition by drawing on data collected from our own pre-service teacher education students as they navigate initial encounters with numeracy (with Dole) and the arts (with O’Brien). In these courses, the authors are concerned with limiting views of self that pre-service teachers can bring to their learning of these two curriculum areas. Such views predominantly stem from pre-service teachers’ personal beliefs about the nature of these subjects, as well as confidence in their own ability ‘to do’ maths and/or art. Informed by Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort, the authors deliberately, but gently move to facilitate the ‘disruption’ of these beliefs, values, and theories about ‘self’ as teacher. Located in supportive communal spaces within courses related to each subject, they authors design “collectivized engagement” (p. 176), as well as scaffolded learning and assessment that seek to engage but soften fears about “losing personal and cultural identities” (p. 176). There is evidence to suggest that this gentle disruption of beliefs and negative self-concepts assists in the eventual renegotiation of the students’ emerging views of self-as-teacher.