Between the real school and the ideal school: another step in building a teaching identity

AbstractDuring their teaching practicum future teachers become acquainted with the rights, duties and obligations of their profession in their trajectory of building a teaching identity. In this process, they go through a number of critical incidents, where we observe that student teachers struggle to integrate the meaning of these incidents with their ideas about the imagined teacher and their own perceived identity. The detailed analysis of discourse generated by two pre-service teachers, grounded in the theory of Communities of Practice and in the theory of meaning called Positioning Theory, allows us to understand how a crucial period in the building of a teaching identity evolves through the seeking of creative solutions to the dilemmas and conflicts they face in their daily interactions with students, teaching colleagues, and the practicum supervisor. In this article we argue that the imagined professional identity that the next generation of teachers forges, far from making them more vulnerable, can become a powerful impetus for innovation and educational change.Keywords: teacher educationteaching identitycommunities of practicepositioning theorynarrative inquiryimagined professional identity AcknowledgementsThe authors are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who made substantial comments to a previous version of this article and who pointed to the explanatory power of Positioning Theory as applied to the cases discussed.Notes1. This article was funded and is part of the research project EDU2010-20852-C02-02(2020–2013) entitled "Building the identity of pre-school and primary education teachers during initial training and the first years of work".2. We will use the terms "education majors", "student teachers" and "future teachers" to refer to the participants in this study. We will refer to the university faculty member that is in charge of coordinating the student teaching as "practicum supervisor and researcher" and the person that oversees the student teaching at the school as the "practicum instructor".3. By "student teaching" or "practicum" we mean a period of six week during students' third year of college in their teacher education program. During this practicum students observe, participate and teach with different degrees of responsibility, depending on the schools and the assigned practicum instructor.4. All names have been changed to ensure anonymity.