Teacher Identity: A Confidence Trick?

Abstract

This chapter explores the joys and frustrations of learning and mastering something new. The chapter draws on just one extended narrative of a beginning teacher who had to contend not just with the demands of teaching but also with life in a small community, stripped of the privacy and anonymity that protected him in the city. In some ways, this is the mirror image of the school culture chapter, as the beginning teacher develops his or her own identity in the context of the identity of the school and of the profession—in short, how a beginner assumes the mantle of a ‘real teacher’. The chapter also investigates some of the dynamics of the profession, as identified in the literature, that conspire to make it difficult for beginning teachers to assimilate into the profession, as well as questioning whether assimilation, as opposed to an approach that welcomes new cultures, is the more life-sustaining dynamic for the profession and for the beginning teacher.