ABSTRACT
For a considerable period of time, college and university teacher education programs were considered to be the primary mechanism for influencing how undergraduate students were socialized into the teaching profession. The role of teacher education programs was to provide learning experiences for future teachers based on the professional ideal of the time. Grounded in a functionalist perspective, preservice teachers were regarded as passive entities who willingly adopted the beliefs of their teacher educators and conformed to the forces of socialization encountered during teacher education (Zeichner, 1979). This assumption presumed that professional socialization began upon recruits’ entry into teacher education programs (O’Leary et al., 2014). Understanding socialization through this functionalist framework was insufficient, however, for explaining why so many teachers entered the workforce and taught in a manner that contradicted what had been emphasized in their teacher education programs (Schempp & Graber, 1992; Templin & Schempp, 1989).
