From clothing to skin: Identity work of student teachers in culminatingfield experiences

What constitutes a good teacher is construed as one who knows content, pedagogy, and student cognitive and emotional development sufficiently. Such role discourse pervades talk about effective teaching among policymakers, the lay public, and to some degree, institutions of teacher education that abide by NCATE-like formulations of program and candidate evaluation. Student teaching is a critical period for identity development of beginning teachers, yet it often lacks the space to work through this process with their peers. We engaged a semester length phenomenological narrative study of ten student teachers in an onsite student teaching seminar. Participants’ stories revealed that a more complete sense of self arose through conflicts encountered and the disjuncture of perceptions and realities of beginning to teach. Based on our analysis of the data, we argue that field-based, reflexive, and situational discourse space has merit as part of the larger teacher education curriculum.