Learning to Speak the Sacred and Learning to Construct the Secret: Two stories of finding space as preservice teachers in professional education

Clandinin and Connelly (1996) describe three stories of teachers' professional lives: secret, cover, and sacred. These descriptions provide an instructive conceptual template to examine how teachers function in the midst of competing educational power structures. But how do preservice teachers learn sacred stories? How do they come to construct secret and cover stories? How does their learning and constructing of such stories affect their "success" as professional educators? Two stories of preservice teachers are presented to illustrate possible responses to these questions from which implications for teacher-educators are drawn.