The significant storyline I identified in the literature is how newly qualified teachers were not sufficiently prepared for the ‘reality’ of teaching within the diversity of the early childhood sector. Accompanying this claim was a concomitant recourse by participants to openly attribute this to their teacher education programme (Aitken, 2005; Giovacco-Johnson, 2005; Mahmood, 1996; Renwick & Boyd, 1995). In local studies this was a significant issue for those beginning teaching in the education and care (childcare) sector.
It was through reading Mahmood’s (1996) study that I effectively determined the focus and direction of my study. Significant discontinuity existed between what the participants in that study understood they had been ‘prepared’ for, and what they encountered as newly qualified teachers. I began to question the linkages between the role and identity of the teacher promulgated in teacher education and the subsequent identities demanded of newly qualified teachers once working in early childhood settings. I was unaware of Aitken’s (2005) study until the end of 2005, by which time I had set direction. However, her study confirmed my focus.
The predominant methodological approach of preparedness studies broadly is the provision of outcome measures (predefined aspects of good or effective teaching) against which respondents report how well prepared they believe they are relative to each of the items listed. In contrast, studies by Lang (1996) and Mahmood (1996) invited participants into the problem space to define, or articulate, what ‘being prepared’ meant to them.
Loughran et al. (2001) argue that students “seek to establish the relevance and value of what they are doing” (p. 14) in teacher education. That is, they want to understand the very process that seeks to ‘turn them into teachers’. With this viewpoint in mind I began to play with the idea of asking participants how they made sense of their teacher education. Therefore, not only did I seek to understand newly qualified teachers’ sense of preparedness but I was also interested in how they understood the process that turned them into qualified teachers.
In addition, I became concerned to build on what had begun in this country (Aitken, 2005; Mahmood, 1996; Renwick & Boyd, 1995). These studies, coupled with Cameron and Baker’s (2004) review revealing the lack of early childhood teacher education research were also influential. Additionally, there was sufficient discussion in the broader literature that contributed to my decision to put the notion of preparedness under erasure whilst simultaneously exploring it.
For McWilliam (1994), much teacher education research is positioned within positivist epistemologies and assumptions that have marginalised the “knowledgeability” (p. 59) of those being researched. This has positioned the teacher education student as not capable of thinking theoretically. Through exploring student teachers’ needs, their talk can be viewed not as impoverished understandings of someone else’s theory or expertise but as insights into their attempts to construct
can now be read as real critiques of teacher education needs talk, not the products of false consciousness” (p. 67). This is an interesting and provocative way of thinking about preparedness texts and of considering the perceptions of students and graduating teachers as stakeholders in their own construction and constitution as teachers. A position I have adopted in this thesis.
Conclusion
Through this review I have positioned this study in the broader field of preparedness studies and also within the wider body of knowledge about learning to teach. The search of relevant literature highlighted the paucity of studies that focus on the learning to teach process in early childhood education, and specifically on students and/or newly qualified teachers sense of preparedness.
Three interwoven themes were identified in the early childhood studies that were reviewed. These are the dichotomy between the real and the ideal, the sanitised curriculum of teacher education, and the discontinuity between the knowledges of teacher education and those of the early childhood teaching. I have suggested that collectively these point to the possibility of lack of impact of early childhood teacher education on learning teaching and being prepared.
I briefly introduced Kennedy’s (1999) argument about the need for situated knowledge, as opposed to an over reliance on theoretical knowledge, to account for the types of findings that suggest tensions between the knowledge of teacher education and sense of preparedness for the reality of teaching. Kennedy’s work suggests ways in which teacher education can bridge the gap between theory and practice. Drawing on Sumara and Luce-Kapler (1996) I have questioned how possible it is to be fully prepared for teaching given the inherent complexity in learning to teach and in being teachers. This is a paradoxical situation.
I came to the research space with the intention to listen to graduates and a desire to understand their perspectives on teacher education and learning to teach, relative to their sense of preparedness. The literature confirmed this direction.
As a result of turning to the research literature my substantive focus settled on the interpretations of newly qualified teachers. Accordingly, I invited participants into the research problem space and came to ask how they understood the process that sought to constitute and construct them as a ‘well prepared teacher’, and ‘what did being
‘prepared’ mean to them’? Because of the emphasis on determining whether pathways into teaching made a difference to teachers’ sense of preparedness (Darling-Hammond et al., 2002) I made a design decision to work with graduating teachers from two very different pathways and institutions. The next chapter sets the study in its methodological context.
Chapter 4:
Methodology
This chapter presents the methodological focus of the study. It discusses the philosophical and theoretical lenses I brought to the study, and outlines related design decisions, including my analytic and interpretive strategies. I initially located the study within a phenomenological perspective. However, in response to the stories I was identifying in the data, coupled with a growing awareness of the limitations of my researcher positioning, I adopted an interpretivist interactionist approach as outlined by Denzin (2001). Research methodologist Ian Baptiste (2001) points out that qualitative studies are “iterative, interactive, and non-linear” (p. 2) which accurately describes the process I engaged in during the research process.
Methodologically, two issues came to frame my thinking. First, I was beginning to question the actual construct of preparedness itself and as a result I began to focus on ‘preparedness’ as a linguistic term. Second, having undertaken an initial review of the literature I formed a position that it would be more productive to ask newly qualified teachers how they made sense of the actual process of teacher education, rather than present them with predefined notions of preparedness. I wanted to know how they understood the process that sought to constitute them as (well) prepared teachers. These two issues led me to frame the research question—‘how do students/newly qualified teachers make sense of their preparedness for teaching?’ The methodological focus of this study concerns how we make sense of a social reality such as teacher education, and specifically how this is understood through the construct of ‘preparedness’. The study is located in the interpretivist research tradition that stresses the intersubjective nature of sense making (Davis, 2004).
Two interlinked stories underpin this chapter. On one hand I write as a Pākehā
female teacher educator, a “biographically situated researcher” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003, p. 31) whose shifting understandings of ‘making sense’, ‘meaning’, ‘understanding’ and ‘knowledge’ became an important research narrative. On the other hand, the chapter provides an account of the research process, which aimed to access, interpret and understand the meanings participants gave to their experiences of ‘being
prepared’. I was challenged in the former narrative through my cultural history to confront a strong ideological allegiance to humanist conceptions of self (and therefore to making sense and meaning) as I came to understand how “discursive subjects become persons” (Willig, 2001, p. 39).
This chapter is in two parts. I begin in Part 1 by discussing the broad principles of interpretivism and then articulate the central tenets of phenomenology, as these provide the conceptual tools and procedures for the initial design of the study. I conclude this part of the chapter by discussing my shift to interpretive interactionism. Part 2 of the chapter provides an account of the research process, including methods and procedures I used in this study.