2: “The Fecundity of the Individual Case”: Considerations of the Pedagogic Heart of Interpretive Work (1992)

Aformer studentteacher phoned me in a panic late one August, excited that she had been offered a job in an Early Childhood Education classroom starting the next week and, of course, apprehensive about all that might entail. She phoned, I suspect, as much for reassurance as for advice. Eight weeks later, well into the school year, she phoned again and recounted the experience of going to her new school just days before the children were to arrive.

The principal was not available when she arrived, and she was instructed by the school secretary that her room was “down there, Room 10.” She had walked down the hallway to what was to be “her room” and paused. The door was shut and she spoke of this shut door being “imposing,” ‘‘as if something was going on in there already” that of which she was not yet part of, something to which she did not yet “belong.” As she told it, she knew that when she opened that door, somehow, “everything would be different,” things would be, in her words “turned around.” She sensed that, once she “stepped in,” she would be finally “crossing over” from student to teacher: “once I entered the room, I knew that would be it.”