The Dynamics of Personal Knowledge and Teacher Education

This article presents a Janus perspective at the halfway mark of Stage One of the Section Eleven project—a research enterprise that follows teachers through their pre-service year at a Faculty of Education and their first two years following the conferring of the Bachelor of Education degree. The research is based upon what Michael Connelly has called “the working assumption that day-to-day teacher education work constitutes a laboratory for the study of teacher education.” The first section of the paper describes the genesis of the project and the overall composition of the “section eleven” class. It is followed by a brief overview of the project's original goals, its sources of data and a description of the evolving methodology. The second section of the paper describes the beginning stages of the individual journeys for four of these student teachers from their arrival at a Faculty of Education through to the end of their first four months as beginning teachers. Our conclusions are tentative, ask questions about how the personal knowledge of teaching candidates can be used and connected to their education and development as teachers. Suggestions for reform in teacher education and development issue from this paper.