Teacher Identity Discourses Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces ◆ ◆ ◆ NCTE-LEA Research Series in Literacy and Composition Andrea A. Lunsford and Beverly J. Moss, Series Editors Alsup • Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces Banks • Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground The NCTE-LEA Research Series in Literacy and Composition publishes groundbreaking work on literacy, on composition, and on the intersec- tions between the two. Volumes in this series are primarily original, authored or co-authored works that are theoretically significant and hold broad relevance to lit- eracy studies, composition, and rhetoric. The series also includes oc- casional landmark compendiums of research. The scope of the series includes qualitative and quantitative methodologies; a range of per- spectives and approaches (e.g., sociocultural, cognitive, feminist, psycholinguistic, pedagogical, critical, historical); and research on di- verse populations, contexts (e.g., classrooms, school systems, families, communities) and forms of literacy (e.g., print, electronic, popular media). The intended audience is scholars, professionals, and stu- dents in a range of fields in English studies, including literacy educa- tion, language arts, composition, and rhetoric. For additional information about the NCTE-LEA Research Series in Liter- acy and Composition and guidelines for submitting proposals, visit www.erlbaum.com or www.ncte.org. Teacher Identity Discourses Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces ◆ ◆ ◆ Janet Alsup Purdue University Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 National Council of Teachers of English 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers National Council of Teachers of English 10 Industrial Avenue 1111 West Kenyon Road Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 Urbana, IL 61801-1096 www.erlbaum.com www.ncte.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alsup, Janet. Teacher identity discourses : negotiating personal and profes- sional spaces / Janet Alsup. p. cm. (NCTE-LEA research series in literacy and composition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-5632-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8058-5853-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. High school teachers—Training of. 2. Teachers—Professional re- lationships. I. Title. LB1777.A48 2005 373.1102—dc22 2005040155 CIP ISBN 1-4106-1728-9 Master e-book ISBN I dedicate this book to Kit Glover, the first person to show me that teachers are, above all, people. This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword ix Deborah P. Britzman Preface xiii 1 A Teaching Life: How and Why This Project 1 Came to Be 2 What Does It Mean to Be a Secondary School 20 Teacher? 3 The Struggle of Subjectivities: Narratives 51 of Tension 4 Memories and Enactments: Experiential 77 Narratives of Teaching and Learning 5 Denying the Mind/Body Split: Narratives About 88 the Embodiment of Teacher Identity 6 The Influence of Others: Narratives About 106 Family and Friends 7 Using Discourse to Create a Teacher Identity: 125 Borderland Narratives vii viii CONTENTS 8 Teaching Is … an Analysis of the Metaphor 147 9 What Do I Believe? Statements of Philosophy 166 10 To Know Thyself: Final Thoughts About Teacher 181 Identity Appendixes A Sample Assignments 197 B Glossary 205 References 207 Author Index 217 Subject Index 221 Foreword Deborah P. Britzman York University The drama of student teaching is also the drama of being a student teacher. Its stage and its staging are overpopulated with the instructions from actual and imagined others. There one first confronts, and hopefully may learn to play with, the contents of one’s own educational archive. Curiously, it is the history of one’s own making and, until it can be spoken, it remains a hidden force. Our opening scene contains these tensions and we may sense how the beginning of learning a profession is chaotic, disorganizing selves in the search for meaning. Educating others while being educated is where the student teacher must begin. It can take a good long while to understand that the work of learning to teach and then the work of trying to teach also en- compass belonging to a profession that can and should question its own au- thority. Yet, for beginners, the question may be which authority to question. One may feel disloyal or worry about losing oneself in doubt. At times, these doubts that seem to take center stage create and then star the character of self-blame. What then becomes dramatic is the figure of the teacher in our educational archive, who returns to berate the mind of the newly arrived for all that she or he lacks. And the student teacher must then ask this demand- ing question: Am I meant to be a teacher? As Janet Alsup constructs this tale, there are emotional events stirring the work of learning to teach, adding more questions, rendering old strategies useless and, perhaps, conditioning the need for a new language. There are tensions in this world. One of the most poignant concerns the experience of having to convey how one feels without knowing what to do. And in this bor- derland of limits and hopes, the way feelings are conveyed in the crowded world of student teaching tends to wander into and animate our earliest ar- ix