Frustrated Returns: Biography, Parental Figures, and the Apprenticeship of Observation

Abstract

This article examines the processes by which the past experiences of undergraduate teacher candidates with their parental figures return in the present, thereby shaping both the nature and the meaning of the experiences offered to them in their initial field placement. Using phenomenological and psychoanalytic lenses, I analyze findings from an ongoing, multiyear study of four aspiring teacher candidates, exploring the life experiences that these teacher candidates brought with them to their teacher preparation program, and how these experiences determined what they could and could not learn in their first formal field experiences. I conclude the article by theorizing the special challenges teachers face in separating out their own childhoods from the childhoods of those they work with, and suggest ways institutionalized teacher education might do a better job of working with such challenges.

Notes

Notes

1 Due to limitations of space, the experiences and stories of one of the candidates with whom I worked, Tali, cannot appear in this article. Given that there were patterns in how all four teacher candidates formed, renegotiated, and opened or closed possibilities for the return of pedagogical relationships, the integrity of the entire data set is, I believe, preserved by working with only these three participants.

2 For example, as Freud (1920/1971) observed, “in melancholia, as in the other narcissistic disorders, a feature of the emotional life which, after Bleuler, we are accustomed to call ambivalence comes markedly to the fore ; by this we mean a directing of antithetical feelings (affectionate and hostile) towards the same person” (p. 435).

3 My insertion of the “suffix” figure onto the “roots” parental, mother, and father is meant to get at the need to create a looser identification around these terms. It is also meant as a frank acknowledgment that many children in our society are raised by loved ones other than their biological parents.

4 I conducted five to six interviews with each participant, each lasting about an hour in length. These were open‐ended, conversational interviews that had participants share accounts of experiences having to do with their relationship with their parents; significant schooling experiences; and experiences in course work and in their field placements. I transcribed each interview myself, and as both phenomenology and psychoanalysis suggest, analyzed them by putting my own experiences as a child, as a teacher, and as a parent, into dialogue with the experiences of the participants.

5 It should go without saying, though, that the two traditions differ in many other ways.

6 I write here assuming that the reader shares an understanding of the demographics of the North American teaching force. Especially at the primary or elementary level, most North American teachers are White, middle‐class females who undergo university‐based teacher preparation as undergraduates, most often between 18 and 22 years of age.

7 By invoking the “we” of teachers, it is not my intention to generalize. I am not saying “all teachers” are one way or another. Rather, this “we” is one of myself and the participants. Everything I write about them, I also write about myself. It is a “we” of solidarity that the reader is invited to join, but need not if her experiences dictate she do otherwise.

8 It is a reflex that I have noticed in myself as well when I volunteer in my children's preschool classroom. When a child—especially a child who is a visible minority—warms up to me, instead of thinking how friendly and open this child is, I find myself implicitly asking, “Aren't they loved at home?”