Abstract
The idea of ‘Apprenticeship of Observation’, proposing that pre-service teachers’ early academic experiences might have effects on their professional development, has been a concern in teacher education in the last forty years. Early success or failure experiences of pre-service teachers in school may have a role in their professional identity development. This study aimed to understand the role of academic performance recollections of pre-service teachers on their professional identity construction from a discursive point of view. Accordingly, the constructions of pre-service teachers in relation to success or failure in their school memories were discursively analyzed. Eighty-one school memories were collected from 87 students who were enrolled in two teacher preparation programs. After the preliminary screening of data, 48 memories were classified as success or failure related in past academic lives of pre-service teachers. The remaining 33 memories were eliminated due to not matching the criterion of academic performance relatedness. Informed by (critical) discursive psychology, the memories of success or failure in school were discursively analyzed. Success and failure were constructed together as the two sides of a performance coin. The academic and professional understandings of pre-service teachers were not independent of their academic history. In their recollections, success or failure was constructed in relation to others and had a role on pre-service teacher’s future academic and career preferences. Key words: Success, failure, school memories, discourse analysis, pre-service teachers.
Highlights
In the beginning of their teacher profession, pre-service teachers already have a perception related to learning, teaching and academic content from the years they spent as students. „Apprenticeship of Observation‟ is a notion that was proposed by Lortie (1975) in his seminal work on teacher socialization
This study aimed to understand the role of academic performance recollections of pre-service teachers on their professional identity construction from a discursive point of view
Since the participants of the study were pre-service teachers, their early experiences and how they recalled those experiences became significant on constructing a professional teacher identity (Miller and Shifflet, 2016; Pritzker, 2012)
Summary
In the beginning of their teacher profession, pre-service teachers already have a perception related to learning, teaching and academic content from the years they spent as students. „Apprenticeship of Observation‟ is a notion that was proposed by Lortie (1975) in his seminal work on teacher socialization. That is prior experiences of teachers in schools as students had an influence on their future instructional practices These early experiences and memories serve as a „frame of reference‟ for the preservice teachers and when they begin to work, they construct their professional identities in an integrative manner between their previous reference frame and actual teaching experiences (Flores and Day, 2006). According to Lortie (1975), „apprentice of observation‟ may not be facilitative for further formal education on teaching According to Grossman (1991), the effect of autobiographical school memories, which may limit the perspective of pre-service students to only an observed form of classroom reality, might be lessened through ways such as reflective understanding, “over-correction” and modeling in the teacher education programs. Feiman-Nemser (2001) proposed that in pre-service teacher education, pre-service teachers should be supported to examine their teaching beliefs in light of good teaching examples
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