Emotions and ‘getting by’: a pre-service teacher navigating professional experience

Abstract

Professional experience is a field increasingly defined by institutionally prescribed practices and outcomes. However, for the pre-service teacher, at an individual level, it is commonly navigated through complex and diverse experiences that for them may defy coherence. What is publicly shared is filtered frequently through a pre-service teacher's own hesitancies and censors. These influence what is deemed by them to be appropriate and strategically wise to share, as well as their perceptions of what needs to be accommodated within institutionally sanctioned versions of the ‘good’ teacher. Drawing on Deborah Britzman's work over the past two decades and, in particular, her claim that teacher becoming is a ‘struggle for voice’, this paper focuses on the three dimensions of ‘voice’ – biography, emotion and institutional structures. In attending to the more personal and emotional within one pre-service teacher's journey through Internship, questions are raised as to how teacher educators can productively work with the more difficult and uncomfortable aspects of pre-service teachers' learning and identity formation.