Mobilising community? Place, identity formation and new teachers’ learning

Abstract

This paper analyses data from a longitudinal study which foregrounds the category of ‘place’ to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work, and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching? Surveys and ethnographic interviews were carried out with 35 new teachers over a three-year period in a region of rural Australia known for its disadvantage. In this paper we focus on the analysis of ethnographic data about ‘community’ which revealed that these new teachers understand the relationship between schools and communities in superficial ways through commonly circulating categories of school-community relationships. Cutting across these categories, however, a storyline analysis revealed that they enacted community through entrenched and taken for granted binary discourses of community as either a cosy place of belonging and comfort, or an abject place of deficit and disadvantage. The failure of new teachers to develop a more nuanced understanding of comfortable communities, and the abjection of communities that are different from their own classed experience, raises important questions in relation to outcomes for rural and regional children. We suggest that the site of teacher education, and the first years of teacher learning at work, are critical for learning ‘community’ as our study suggests that these assumptions become more entrenched as new teachers are further socialised into the institution of schooling.

Keywords:

• place
• community
• discourse/storylines
• beginning teachers

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose generous and constructive feedback has improved this paper. This research is part of a project supported by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and the Victorian Institute of Teaching. We also acknowledge the work of our co-researchers Margaret Plunkett and Michael Dyson, and our research assistant Miriam Potts.

Notes

1. Berry Street is the common term used to denote an educational option for those children who cannot be accommodated in the education system.