Chapter 6: Learning to Teach: Powerful Practices at Work During the Practicum

Appelbaum (2008) tells us that “teaching is learning, and learning is teaching” (p. 1). I am interested in exploring how pre-service teachers come to teach and learn in the context of their mathematics practice in schools. My objective is to find out how certain versions of effective mathematics teaching, and not others, come to be intelligible to them. The focus is on the practicum experience, because it is in schools where possibilities and constraints of the pre-service teacher’s understanding of herself as an effective teacher in the classroom are first fully confronted—where relationships are directly implicated and where multiple meanings are made. The practicum experience is where structural and organizational school processes and taken-for-granted understandings amongst practitioners shape the pre-service teacher’s sense- of-self as a teacher in the classroom.

Successful practicum stories are often built around the cornerstone of community (Alton-Lee, 2003; Anthony & Walshaw, 2007). Community is about interactions between contexts and people—a relation between settings and the people within those settings. Within the practicum, a sense of community develops from shared understandings of respective roles and an agreed upon meaning of pedagogical practice. Supervising teachers are key players in establishing the kind of community that will facilitate a productive practicum experience (Brown & Danaher, 2008; Darling-Hammond, Chung, & Fre- low, 2002). Not only do they contribute to the professional learning of the pre-service teacher, they also, according to Sinclair (2008), influence “how,” and, indeed, “if” the pre-service teacher’s commitment to teaching will be sustained. Successful pre-service teachers, as Sinclair observes, are those who work within a professional community of shared knowledge of and shared thinking about pedagogical practice, and who are assisted both practically and emotionally through personal and systemic support.

Specifically, in this chapter, I am searching for insight about how teacher identity is negotiated within the structures and community of practitioners charged with the task of supporting pre-service teachers’ development in schools. I am seeking to explain the central paradox of learning to teach, namely, that “there can be no learning without conflict, but the conflict that animates learning threatens to derail the precarious efforts of trying to learn” (Britzman, 2003, p. 3). Highly influential in the discussion have been Foucault’s understandings of power and how subjects are produced and how intersubjective negotiations take shape. I draw upon Foucault’s conceptual frame to understand how a group of pre-service teachers create a sense-of-self as teacher that is simultaneously present, prospective, and retrospective, as well as rational and otherwise.