Chapter 4: Transformative Pathways in Becoming an Early Childhood Teacher

As university-based teacher educators, we are committed to supporting student teachers as they struggle with the complexities and challenges of becoming early childhood teachers. In doing so, we too encounter complexities and challenges as we inquire into and attempt to make explicit, our understandings of early childhood professional development and practice. As we explore the context and nature of student teacher development and our practices in supporting that development, we engage in critical appreciation (Fish, 1998) to construct a deeper understanding of the complexities of teachers’ work. Like many of the students and teachers with whom we have spoken, we struggle to find language that adequately conveys our developing understandings of the complexity of professional development and practice. Our struggle, in part, is because our interest is not in what professional practice “looks like at the level of its visible characteristics, but how the visible and invisible characteristics of professional practice come together … in harmony” (Fish, 1998, p. 199).