Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal And Professional Spaces (Ncte-Lea Research Series in Literacy and Composition)

251 Pages·2005·1.53 MB·English

by  Janet Alsup

Teacher Identity Discourses
Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces
◆ ◆ ◆
NCTE-LEA Research Series
in Literacy and Composition
Andrea A. Lunsford and Beverly J. Moss, Series Editors
Alsup • Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and
Professional Spaces
Banks • Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
The NCTE-LEA Research Series in Literacy and Composition publishes
groundbreaking work on literacy, on composition, and on the intersec-
tions between the two.
Volumes in this series are primarily original, authored or co-authored
works that are theoretically significant and hold broad relevance to lit-
eracy studies, composition, and rhetoric. The series also includes oc-
casional landmark compendiums of research. The scope of the series
includes qualitative and quantitative methodologies; a range of per-
spectives and approaches (e.g., sociocultural, cognitive, feminist,
psycholinguistic, pedagogical, critical, historical); and research on di-
verse populations, contexts (e.g., classrooms, school systems, families,
communities) and forms of literacy (e.g., print, electronic, popular
media). The intended audience is scholars, professionals, and stu-
dents in a range of fields in English studies, including literacy educa-
tion, language arts, composition, and rhetoric.
For additional information about the NCTE-LEA Research Series in Liter-
acy and Composition and guidelines for submitting proposals, visit
www.erlbaum.com or www.ncte.org.
Teacher Identity Discourses
Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces
◆ ◆ ◆
Janet Alsup
Purdue University
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, New Jersey 07430
National Council of Teachers of English
1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers National Council of Teachers of English
10 Industrial Avenue 1111 West Kenyon Road
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 Urbana, IL 61801-1096
www.erlbaum.com www.ncte.org
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alsup, Janet.
Teacher identity discourses : negotiating personal and profes-
sional spaces / Janet Alsup.
p. cm.
(NCTE-LEA research series in literacy and composition)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-5632-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8058-5853-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. High school teachers—Training of. 2. Teachers—Professional re-
lationships. I. Title.
LB1777.A48 2005
373.1102—dc22 2005040155
CIP
ISBN 1-4106-1728-9 Master e-book ISBN
I dedicate this book to Kit Glover,
the first person to show me that teachers are,
above all, people.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Foreword ix
Deborah P. Britzman
Preface xiii
1 A Teaching Life: How and Why This Project 1
Came to Be
2 What Does It Mean to Be a Secondary School 20
Teacher?
3 The Struggle of Subjectivities: Narratives 51
of Tension
4 Memories and Enactments: Experiential 77
Narratives of Teaching and Learning
5 Denying the Mind/Body Split: Narratives About 88
the Embodiment of Teacher Identity
6 The Influence of Others: Narratives About 106
Family and Friends
7 Using Discourse to Create a Teacher Identity: 125
Borderland Narratives
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 Teaching Is … an Analysis of the Metaphor 147
9 What Do I Believe? Statements of Philosophy 166
10 To Know Thyself: Final Thoughts About Teacher 181
Identity
Appendixes
A Sample Assignments 197
B Glossary 205
References 207
Author Index 217
Subject Index 221
Foreword
Deborah P. Britzman
York University
The drama of student teaching is also the drama of being a student teacher.
Its stage and its staging are overpopulated with the instructions from actual
and imagined others. There one first confronts, and hopefully may learn to
play with, the contents of one’s own educational archive. Curiously, it is the
history of one’s own making and, until it can be spoken, it remains a hidden
force. Our opening scene contains these tensions and we may sense how the
beginning of learning a profession is chaotic, disorganizing selves in the
search for meaning. Educating others while being educated is where the
student teacher must begin. It can take a good long while to understand that
the work of learning to teach and then the work of trying to teach also en-
compass belonging to a profession that can and should question its own au-
thority. Yet, for beginners, the question may be which authority to question.
One may feel disloyal or worry about losing oneself in doubt. At times, these
doubts that seem to take center stage create and then star the character of
self-blame. What then becomes dramatic is the figure of the teacher in our
educational archive, who returns to berate the mind of the newly arrived for
all that she or he lacks. And the student teacher must then ask this demand-
ing question: Am I meant to be a teacher?
As Janet Alsup constructs this tale, there are emotional events stirring the
work of learning to teach, adding more questions, rendering old strategies
useless and, perhaps, conditioning the need for a new language. There are
tensions in this world. One of the most poignant concerns the experience of
having to convey how one feels without knowing what to do. And in this bor-
derland of limits and hopes, the way feelings are conveyed in the crowded
world of student teaching tends to wander into and animate our earliest ar-
ix