Troubling identities: teacher education students' constructions of class and ethnicity

Abstract

Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers and teacher educators recognizing and valuing difference. Too often, in teacher education programs, when markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity, ‘race’, or social class are examined, the focus is on developing student teachers' understandings of how these discourses shape learner identities and rarely on how these also shape teachers' identities. This article reports on a research project that explored how student teachers understand ethnicity and socio‐economic status. In a preliminary stage of the research, we asked eight Year 3 teacher education students who had attended mainly Anglo‐Australian, middle class schools as students and as student teachers, to explore their own ethnic and classed identities. The complexities of identity are foregrounded in both the assumptions we made in selecting particular students for the project and in the ways they constructed their own identities around ethnicity and social class. In this article we draw on these findings to interrogate how categories of identity are fluid, shifting and ongoing processes of negotiation, troubling and complex. We also consider the implications for teacher education.

Notes

1. We use the terms ‘practicum’, ‘teaching rounds’ and ‘teaching experiences’ interchangeably; these refer to the three week blocks which teacher education students spend full time in schools under the supervision of an experienced teacher, developing their classroom curriculum and pedagogical skills.

2. This project, ‘A Different Quality Practicum: Investigating student teachers understandings of sameness and difference’ was funded through a Deakin University, Faculty of Education Quality Learning Research Priority Grant in 2003.

3. Pseudonyms have been used throughout for students and for the schools.

4. In 2004, we received funding for a follow‐on research project entitled ‘Quality Teaching for difference: Investigating teachers' beliefs and practices in culturally diverse classrooms.’ In this project, we explored, with experienced teachers, how they engage through their classroom practices productively with students whose ethnicity and class identities are different to their own. Analysis of data is currently underway and initial results have been reported in a conference paper: A. Allard and N. Santoro, ‘Making sense of difference? Teaching identities in postmodern contexts’, presented at the Australian Association of Research in Education (AARE) National Conference, Melbourne, Australia, November 2004.