Community and conversation: tackling beginning teacher doubt and disillusion

Abstract

Margaret Somerville has suggested that a new methodology of postmodern emergence might allow researchers to disrupt the taken-for-granted and provide fresh insight into familiar problems. One such familiar problem is the doubt and disillusion many early-career teachers experience, both during their teacher education and in their first years. Attrition rates are high. This paper, co-authored by two teacher educators and two early-career secondary teachers, draws on Somerville’s ideas by creating multiple modes of creative expression in order to allow fresh insight to emerge from the relationship between the multiple parts of the paper. Different readers will draw their own conclusions from the rich material presented, but for the authors the research reminds us of the regenerative potency of relationships and conversations in which doubts and disillusion can be expressed and heard. The implications for teacher education, at a time when direct face-to-face time with students is being eroded, are explored.

Keywords:

• Britzman
• conversation
• postmodern emergence
• teacher attrition
• teacher education

Notes

^1. Hannah and Libby are co-authors, with Steve, of this paper. Rachel, the fourth co-author, is an academic who had no direct role in the Graduate Diploma teaching programme. Her role as co-author is described in the “Methodological Postscript” section.

^2. The Graduate Diploma of Education, also known as the Grad Dip, is a one year course done after a student’s undergraduate degree.

^3. Because we have taken the liberty of making these four academics (and two others in a subsequent section) into characters in our paper, we sent a copy of the paper to each of them and asked for their explicit permission to use their ideas and words in this way. All agreed (with an enthusiasm we found very encouraging). We want to emphasise, of course, that while the words we have put into each character’s mouth were sourced from published writing, and though we have checked with each author to make sure that we have not misrepresented them, the words as we have written them are sometimes not direct quotes. We have played with the expression to fit the more conversational tone.

^4. This is an entirely imaginary letter from an imaginary supervisor, though it does cover some of the material explored in Steve’s unpublished thesis, Mating with the world: On the nature of story-telling in psychotherapy (Shann, 2000). Its purpose here is to provide a bridge between the structuralist ideas of Winnicott (1971) that influenced our early thinking and the more relational perspective we ended up taking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steve Shann

Steve is Assistant Professor in Teacher Education. His research interests include the world of the early-career teacher, the nature of secondary English teaching, and the possibilities of a mythopoetic methodology.

Hannah Germantse

Hannah is a former Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education student at the University of Canberra. She is now teaching English in a rural secondary school.

Libby Pittard

Libby is a former Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education student at the University of Canberra. She is now teaching both science and humanities units in a Canberra secondary college.

Rachel Cunneen

Rachel is Assistant Professor in Teacher Education. She has a PhD in Australian literature and has taught secondary English.