ABSTRACT
As John Dewey (1938/1963) argued, experience is a vital aspect of an effective education. Through experiencing various intellectual, hands-on activities, students can deepen their understanding of the topic at hand. In order for an experience to lead to learning, it must connect to and positively influence future experiences as well as encourage interaction with the material, social world. Dewey emphasized that experience by itself is not inherently educative; experiences must exhibit the qualities of continuity and interaction in order to lead to human growth:
Different situations succeed one another. But because of the principle of continuity something is carried over from the earlier to the later ones. As an individual passes from one situation to another, his [sic] world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. (1938/1963, p. 42)
This continuity, this connection between past and present experience, is consistent with borderland discourse through which the preservice teacher connects personal ideologies and subjectivities to professional ones. Random experiences without such connection do not lead to professional identity development, and sometimes disjointed experiences can lead to the rejection of the idea, concept, or issue under consideration, such as when a new teacher rejects a particular teaching method because of a failure to see its long-term classroom potential. Conversely, continuous experiences pro-
vide opportunities for the preservice teacher to enact the behaviors and embody the physical presence of a professionalized, successful teacher. Daily experience is how identities are translated into real-world action, and such action affects the lives of others, namely students. Dewey discussed this material and social component of experience in Experience and Education (1938/1963):
The statement that individuals live in a world means, in the concrete, that they live in a series of situations. And when it is said that they live in these situations, the meaning of the word “in” is different from its meaning when it is said that pennies are “in” a pocket or paint is “in” a can. It means, once more, that interaction is going on between an individual and objects and other persons. (p. 41)
Similar to learning concepts or mastering ideas, identity construction not only affects experience, it also depends on experience-or the bodily enactment of ideological positions-in order to come to fruition. This chapter lays the groundwork for this discussion of experience by analyzing narratives told by the six participants about educational events they remembered both as a student and as a teacher. The experience itself, when it is happening in the present moment, is the enactment, the embodiment (or attempt at embodiment) of a particular identity position; the narrative told after the experience represents each preservice teacher’s attempt to understand the experience and reflects how the preservice teachers fit this experience into their developing personal and professional selves.
