Is ‘good’ really good? Exploring internationally educated teacher candidates' verbal descriptions of their in-school experiences

Abstract

In this paper we offer an incident that exemplifies one of multiple strategies internationally educated teacher candidates (IETC) use to survive practicum experiences. More specifically, we present an incident that demonstrates teacher candidates' strategic way of using words, such as ‘good’ and ‘fine’, to disguise true feelings about experiences of their teaching placements in schools. We also offer related strategies used by these IETC to negotiate and nurture classroom relations with peers and instructors at the Faculty of Education. Here we argue that within teacher education programmes, especially in the practicum component and other situations that are shaped by it, language is an active force that is used, on the one hand, by associate teachers to control and prevent teacher candidates from changing established norms and values; on the other hand, however, language is used by teacher candidates to defend themselves against being controlled. We present conclusions about this incident drawing from our three years of working with teacher candidates from cultures and languages that are different from and often marginalised by those of the Canadian mainstream. In our discussion, we employ studies in communication and language use to illustrate the complex meaning entailed by this incident.

Keywords:

• intercultural communication
• sociolinguistics
• teacher training
• language awareness

Notes

1. The Ontario College of Teachers is a governing body that allows teachers to ‘regulate and govern their own profession in the public interest. Teachers who want to work in publicly funded schools in Ontario must be certified to teach in the province and be members of the College’.

2. We have previously argued that teacher candidates of this kind are more concerned about ‘blending in’ to the Canadian mainstream than with affirming their cultural identities. As a result, they see ‘acceptance’ as simultaneous to becoming Canadian, which entails doing things, including speaking and teaching, in ways that resemble those of the Canadian mainstream.

3. Following Statistics Canada's census descriptors, recent immigrant refers to permanent resident people who have been in the country for a period of five years or less.

4. Administrative personnel in the field placement office include a manager and two support staff. The manager works together with the support staff to arrange four placements for about 700 teacher candidates each school year. This issue is compounded with not having a big enough pool of associate teachers and school principals volunteering to accept the candidates, inadequate reimbursement for the teachers ($5/week), necessity to place more than one candidate with one teacher or sending candidates to teachers that had issues with the candidates in the previous years.

5. This is an occurrence in which we incidentally discovered that teacher candidates who used ‘good’ to describe their teaching practicum did not necessarily have good experiences as commonly understood to mean positive. On the contrary, these candidates had been humiliated, embarrassed and often outwardly rejected by their associate teachers.

6. Together, we taught the seminar from 2005 to 2007 to two groups of teacher candidates.

7. Previously, we document three concerns that impact teacher candidates' practice: (a) Concern for power and authority (gaining respect among students, parents and colleagues and credibility as professionals); (b) concern for language (conforming to the standards of the already-established classroom discourses in schools) and (c) concern for sociocultural acceptance (being accepted by associate teachers and students for who they are, culturally (Dlamini & Martinovic, 2007).

8. Elsewhere, Dlamini (2002) argues that teacher candidates position women professors from marginalised groups differently and marginally from their white peers and that they do not receive the automatic respect and authority that is given to these mainstream professors. As a result of this position we held, it took us some time to view ourselves as potentially mainstream representatives in practice.

9. James provides a critical outlook to role models and argues, for instance, that model is complex and goes beyond the surface expectation that Black people will model good values to Black students. He calls for the need to examine what values are being modelled, what these values represent and to ask ourselves the outcomes of such modelling. James writes that Black teachers are ‘scrutinized, tested, and evaluated for the extent to which [they] “ignore” or “affirm” Black students or “take the place of the colonizer”. The teachers from diverse but similar backgrounds as students can appear “too harsh” and having “unreasonable [higher] expectations” of diverse students, which may lead into conflicting situations and further student alienations’ (James, 2001, p. 162).