Archeology, legos, and haunted houses: novice teachers’ shifting understandings of self and curricula through metaphor

Abstract

As teacher educators in an alternative certification and master’s programme, we support Teach For America (TFA) teachers who are developing understandings of learning, teaching, and curriculum while they are already working full-time in classrooms. Using critical discourse analysis, we analysed 109 metaphors for curriculum created by 27 novice TFA teachers at five points during a curriculum design course we co-taught in order to determine, ‘What understandings and dispositions related to curriculum design do novice teachers’ metaphors reveal, particularly in the context of their work in urban Title One schools?’ Two primary continua emerged, creating four distinct categories, one related to agency (the internal vs. external construction of curriculum) and the other to pliancy (the flexibility and responsiveness vs. the rigid and scripted nature of curriculum). Analysis of the metaphors indicated that many novice teachers began to problematize a depiction of curriculum as an externally crafted and rigid construct through which they (and their students) were objects rather than subjects. Our findings indicated that metaphors could serve as a meaningful tool of inquiry which revealed the momentary stances of novice teachers toward curriculum while making evident shifts in the beliefs and understandings over time.