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English Education Students and Professional Identity Development: Using Narrative and Metaphor to Challenge Preexisting Ideologies

During my six years as an English educator, I have seen many preservice teachers express confidence in their ability to teach secondary school English early in their undergraduate programs. This confidence, while not always misplaced or inappropriate, can mask a lack of critical understanding of effective pedagogy, especially when it is based on the students’ memories of their school experiences, which my students intend to replicate in their own classrooms. Often, their personal histories have become foundational narrative ideologies on which their teaching philosophies are built. Many educational researchers and theorists believe, in fact, that personal histories can have a more powerful effect on the beliefs and practices of preservice and new teachers than university courses (see Lortie 1975; Crow 1987a, 1987b; Ross 1987; Britzman 1991; Holt-Reynolds 1992; Knowles 1992). Others find that teacher education courses can promote the development of preservice teachers’ professional identities if they ask the students to examine critically or interrogate their personal histories for evidence of what constitutes a good teacher and what the job of teaching entails (see Knowles and Holt-Reynolds 1991; Bullough and Stokes 1994; Tillema 1998). To engage my students in such critical examination, I have developed two assignments for a course titled “The Teaching of Literature in the Secondary Schools.” I call these assignments the “pedagogical discussion assignment” and the “photographic philosophies assignment.” The first assignment