ABSTRACT
The careers and experiences of teachers, and the profession of teaching in general, cannot be separated from the processes of recruitment and training. In order to make sense of the dynamics of teachers and their work, there needs to be some understanding and analysis of who joins the profession and how they learn the techniques, strategies and everyday realities of teaching. The beginning of a teaching career has been documented and described as a classic socialization story (see Bullough 1997, Huberman 1993, Lacey 1977). Various chronologies or phases have been identified as elements of the route to professional teacher status. The early work of Colin Lacey (1977), for example, described a narrative or chronology for becoming a teacher through initial training. Lacey identified four distinct phases in the process of becoming a teacher: • the honeymoon period-a phase of new experiences and optimism; • the search-the shift towards the need to search for materials and ways
of teaching and managing the classroom; • the crisis-a loss of confidence and optimism, a sense of failure and lack
of control; • learning to get by’—displacing the blame of failure and developing the
strategies for coping in the classroom. Variations on this chronological approach to teacher training are evident in more contemporary literature. Huberman (1993), for example, describes a
three-part pattern, from certainty through experimentation to stabilization. And Bullough (1997), in a recent review of initial teacher education, suggests that beginning teachers move from a trial-and-error approach to teaching towards a more systematic development of teaching strategies-‘a clashing of conceptions of self with institutional role expectations and of an eventual but not always happy resolution’ (Bullough 1997:80).
