ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the voices of a beginning teacher (Derek, a first-year teacher at the time of the data presented here) in conversation about teaching with two teacher educators (Peter and Tom) who worked closely with him during his teacher education program. Earlier versions were presented at several conferences in 1996, and we include our final version here for several reasons. We want to demonstrate the potential for continuing conversation between teacher educators and those they teach in pre-service programs. The growing access of teachers to electronic mail is an important new resource that permits new teachers to share their voices with each other as well as with teacher educators. We also want to demonstrate to those learning to teach that working in teacher education programs can be just as complex and challenging as teaching in elementary and secondary schools. We hope that this chapter demonstrates that teacher educators who support and encourage the development of new teachers’ voices also need to develop their own voices and share them in appropriate ways with those learning to teach.
