Heroes and villains: the insistence of the imaginary and the novice teacher’s need to believe

ABSTRACT

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman, as their powerful need to believe. The paper draws on psychoanalytic theory in order gain insights into this process, viewing the pre-service teachers’ accounts of their mentors as fantasies that serve a stabilising function in order to manage the intense emotional demands of schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with considerations of how teacher educators might ameliorate the ideality of novice teachers, reflecting the insistence of the imaginary, and hence enable them to benefit more from the practicum experience. We briefly suggest the use of tools that work within the symbolic register to exercise a mediating role in the context of these intense demands.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher identity formation
• professional learning
• mentoring
• pyschoanalysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the New South Wales Association of Independent Schools and thank the schools and teachers that participated in the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The New South Wales Association of Independent Schools is the peak body representing the independent (i.e., private) schooling sector in New South Wales. The University of New South Wales is one of a number of teacher education credentialing institutions in New South Wales.

2. We will use the terms supervising teachers and mentors, and student teachers, pre-service teachers and mentees, interchangeably in this paper.

3. Space does not permit an elaboration on the specifics of the tools here but for an in-depth discussion and analysis, see Sheridan, 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Clarke

Matthew Clarke is a professor and chair in Education at York St John University in the UK. His research interests include education policy and its impact on teachers.

Lynn Sheridan

Dr Lynn Sheridan is a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research interests are in mentoring, professional judgement making, and non-cognitive capabilities.