Constructions of Teaching: Alternative Certification and the Education Profession

Life history discourses from the current study's 10 alternatively certified secondary teachers suggest that recent alternative certification laws in one state detract from national professionalization efforts. Repeating the early national history of teaching, the state has shifted the power to prepare educators from the academy, back to neophytes, working alone in their classrooms or with a select few experienced teachers. The participants did experience a degree of autonomy and collegiality, but they maximized the importance of subject matter knowledge bases and minimized pedagogy's relevance or limited it to procedural or mechanical competence. In so doing, they jeopardized teaching's struggling status and thwarted their own conceptual understanding of teaching.