Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 2014

Vol. 42, No. 1, 8297, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2013.856000

Community and conversation: tackling beginning teacher doubt and

disillusion
Steve Shann*, Hannah Germantse, Libby Pittard and Rachel Cunneen
University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia
(Received 20 December 2011; accepted 14 January 2013)
Margaret Somerville has suggested that a new methodology of postmodern emergence
might allow researchers to disrupt the taken-for-granted and provide fresh insight into
familiar problems. One such familiar problem is the doubt and disillusion many earlycareer teachers experience, both during their teacher education and in their first years.
Attrition rates are high. This paper, co-authored by two teacher educators and two
early-career secondary teachers, draws on Somervilles ideas by creating multiple
modes of creative expression in order to allow fresh insight to emerge from the
relationship between the multiple parts of the paper. Different readers will draw their
own conclusions from the rich material presented, but for the authors the research
reminds us of the regenerative potency of relationships and conversations in which
doubts and disillusion can be expressed and heard. The implications for teacher
education, at a time when direct face-to-face time with students is being eroded, are
explored.
Keywords: Britzman; conversation; postmodern emergence; teacher attrition; teacher
education

Part 1: the narrative

A short film of a caf conversation
The scene is a table at the back of one of Canberras licenced cafes. Three people sit at
the table, taking their first mouthfuls of the beers that have just arrived. Its a hot
December day.
Hannah and Libby1 are in their twenties, and have just finished their Grad Dip2 year.
Steve, in his mid-sixties, is one of their lecturers.
The three have met to continue discussions that have been going on for some weeks
now, about the possibility of writing something about Libby and Hannahs experiences of
their teacher education year.
Steve:
Hannah:
Steve:
Hannah:
Libby:

So, finished at last. The course is over.

Scary thought.
Scary?
Well, the next step is having a class on my own. Im not sure Im ready.
I know what you mean. The year has gone so quickly. Dont you think Steve?
Has it gone quickly for you too?

*Corresponding author. Email: Steve.Shann@canberra.edu.au

2013 Australian Teacher Education Association

Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

Steve:

Hannah:

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In some ways, yes, very quickly, too quickly. Its a short course, this one-year
Graduate Diploma, and theres always a feeling at the end that we could have
done with more time.
In some ways, Im glad its over. Its been a tough year. Unexpected really,
distressing at times. I distinctly remember sitting in that lecture hall, about half
way through the course, watching you set up for one of your lectures Steve,
and feeling really pissed off with you and with everything.

Libby smiles and nods. The three sit quietly for a while.

Hannah:

Steve:
Hannah:

Steve:
Hannah:

Libby:

Hannah:

Libby:
Hannah:
Libby:

I think it was connected to this feeling I still have, of being unprepared for
whats to come. I was sitting in that lecture theatre, thinking that in a few short
weeks Id be out on prac[ticum], and soon after that the course would end, and
I just had this horrible sense of not being ready yet. I remember sitting there,
looking around at all these people Id got to know, and I hated the idea of
leaving the friends Id made. I just wasnt ready to move on. I still feel this to
some extent.
You were feeling unprepared and pissed off.
Yes, disgruntled, angry, out of sorts. I couldnt engage with the course material, I
kept worrying that the ideas I was being introduced to werent practical enough;
in the tutorials, I felt like we were wasting time. I remember feeling abandoned
by the teaching staff, which was weird because for the whole of the first
semester Id found you all to be so knowledgeable and inspiring.
So, a feeling of being disillusioned.
[pause] A bit perhaps. Grumpy, irritable. Nothing as cerebral or as final as
disillusioned, I dont think. Confronted, I guess, and not liking the feeling.
Id always found academic work pretty easy, but this was different. I kept
wondering if I had the right temperament to be a teacher.
I went through that disillusion too. Id always done well at school and
university by finding out what the staff wanted. Id always approached my
studies as if I were a blank page; Id find out what the teachers wanted and
Id give it to them. But on the teaching course it was different. For a while, I
couldnt work out what you staff wanted from me. For one assignment, I got
what I thought was a bad grade, and I was angry, really pissed. At times I just
wanted to stop caring, go through the motions, but I couldnt really. I guess
because I had this underlying sense that there was some kind of change going
on in me, something to do with becoming less dependent on what others
thought of me.
I couldnt not care! I tried, but I couldnt! Early on in the course I had this
exhilarating feeling that Id found my tribe, that I liked being around these
people, so I couldnt just be angry. I wanted to reject it all, but I couldnt.
But it hasnt been easy.
Its been bloody hard work. At a deeply personal, confronting level, its been
hard work.
But Ive changed, I think. Ive come to see myself differently. Or my relationship to the world differently. I used to think of myself as floating around in a
transparent bubble, with the real world outside, out of reach, somewhere else. I
think this year has changed that. Somehow, the distress and the intense

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Steve:
Libby:

Steve:
Libby:

Hannah:

Steve:
Hannah:

Steve:
Hannah:

emotional engagement has led me to feel a part of things, instead of apart

from things. That the real world is what Im actually experiencing, what Im
actually living. Its not out there any more. Im right in it.
Painfully in it.
At times, yes. At times, it was exciting too. A sort of in-between time. In
between a past that was known and secure but somehow limiting, protected,
cut off in a way, and a future that was unknown but was exciting and different.
That last day of the course felt a bit like a celebration of something. The year.
Having got through it. Growing up, in a way. On that last day, I felt pleased
that everything turned out well, grateful to have had the opportunities and
support Ive had, relieved, and yet wistful that the course was over. It was a
strange feeling being so completely exhausted and so enthused and inspired at
the same time. I feel like my mind has been opened and thoroughly ploughed.
Its sounding as though there was a significant shift for you over the course of
the year.
I think that to begin with I was looking externally, at what was required of me,
and then I became dissatisfied and started to look more internally. The feedback I got, positive and negative, exciting and distressing, was all a part of
this. I learnt a lot and gained greater understanding of what it really means to
be human, which was new to me, being much more habitually driven by the
side of me that emphasises the rational, strategic, scientific, standardising,
quantifying, and de-emotifying (to coin a word!). The course was definitely
humanizing and that was because of the other people that I encountered.
I suppose thats true of me in a way. That Ive come to see myself differently, I
mean, largely because of the relationships that formed and which Ive come to
really value. Ive always thought of myself as separate, independent, selfcontained. Ive tried to live and resolve and understand absolutely everything
in my head before I took one step in the real world and so far as I can tell,
the only real result of this is a lot of pressure, and confusion and doubt and
chaos. The realisation of late is that this is just not viable, it cannot be done.
Life cannot only be planned or prepared for. It must also be lived. Sometimes,
I feel like this whole year has been a conflict for me between two versions of
myself, two Hannahs.
An old Hannah and a new Hannah?
Sometimes, as the three of us have been talking about this together over the past
couple of weeks, its seemed like there was an old Hannah with a new Hannah
emerging. Thinking about these two Hannahs has been helpful in that it showed
me that there was movement and transition in how I saw myself. But it didnt sit
right with me, this idea that they were discrete options, almost as if one had to
be extinguished by the other. Defining Hannah-ness is tricky, and I can never
capture it completely, just how I am experiencing it at the time. If you ask me
today I would say one thing, but I guarantee you, if youd asked me a week ago,
it would have been something else entirely, because it turns out that Im . . . I
dont know . . . Im context specific. . . sort of permanently under construction. It
seems more like Im many things and many changing things.
Context specific, yes, I like that.
All year I have felt in a state of becoming I have found a challenge I believe
in and a desire to do it well, but I dont yet feel able to do it.

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Part 2: methodology
An imagined conversation between four academics3
Dramatis personae
Tom Barone, Professor of Education in the Arizona State University
Steve (Author), Teacher educator
Deborah Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor at University of Massachusetts,
Psychoanalyst
Margaret Somerville, Professor of Education and Research Leader at Monash University
Tom:
Steve:
Tom:
Steve:
Tom:
Steve:

Tom:
Steve:

Tom:
Steve:

Tom:
Steve:

So what is it that weve just seen? Did you have cameras there in the caf?
No! How artificial would that be! No, it was a reconstruction . . .
A fabrication.
An imaginative attempt to capture in a condensed form the essence of what
Libby and Hannah ended up saying about their experience.
So you didnt meet in a caf at all!
We met at a caf, and there was a particular meeting on a hot December day
that began with three beers, and we talked about our project as we drank our
beers. But the conversation you just saw and heard was my attempt to
condense their stories into something manageable and usable.
Your attempt. You didnt work on this with Hannah and Libby?
All along the way. I read their writings, I wrote reports of our conversations, I
sent them versions of the constructed scene, and what youve just seen is
something we are all happy with.
The three of you are happy that the scene accurately conveys their experience?
I think the most we can claim is that the scene youve just watched tells a
couple of stories that are worth thinking about, that bringing various theoretical lenses to these narratives might help us approach teacher education with
more awareness about how we might mediate the necessarily painful transition
from student in a school and university system to teacher in a school.
So why begin with this scene in the caf?
Maxine Greene has written in her book Releasing the Imagination (Greene,
1995) about the importance of seeing people big. She says . . ..

Steve selects, from a pile of books on the floor, Greenes Releasing the Imagination. It is
festooned with coloured sticky notes. He flicks through them quickly til he finds the page
he wants.
Steve:

Tom:
Steve:

. . . she says: To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human
beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and
particularity instead. One must see from the point of view of the participant in
the midst of what is happening if one is to be privy to the plans people make,
the initiatives they take, the uncertainties they face (Greene, 1995, p. 10).
This kind of narrative helps us enter what Maxine Greene calls the aesthetic
space.
Greene reminds us that with this kind of writing, were not trying to resolve
anything, to prove anything, Were trying to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily
unseen, to make visible what has sunk out of sight (1995, p. 28).

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Tom:

Deborah:
Steve:

Tom:

Margaret:

Steve:

Margaret:

Steve:
Margaret:
Steve:

Margaret:
Tom:

A reader inserts this fictional world into the context of her daily experience in
order to see what it suggests about familiar conditions, conventional practices,
and the values and ideologies that support them (Barone, 2001, p. 736). The
aim, here, is to redirect an ongoing conversation (Barone, 2007, p. 465).
The reason we might read and do ethnography, then, is to think the unthought
in more complex ways (Britzman, 2003, p. 253).
Im not wanting to write these stories, and to explore them in particular ways,
to assert particular truths (many students experience existential distress; the
distress goes through recognisable stages; learning to be a teacher is doing
something to who we are becoming), though its true that I believe these
things. Its more to open up our conversations to the existence of this distress,
to explore implications and actions. So beginning with the story of Libby and
Hannah attempts to open things up.
This kind of writing gets readers thinking about issues and people in their
own lived-in world, away from the text people who may nevertheless bear
familiar resemblances to those portrayed within the text (Barone, 2009,
p. 594).
I can see now why you have chosen to begin with this scene. Each time a
piece of research is represented in these ways, new insights emerge. The aim
of these transgressive forms is to open up and disrupt taken-for-granted ways
of interpreting the world (Somerville, 2007, p. 226).
Its related, isnt it, to what happens when we enter the aesthetic space. Were
not just moulding messy and uncapturable reality into narrative form. Were
opening ourselves up in the way all creative artists attempt to open themselves
up, to the unexpected, the unthought, the unimagined. Its what you,
Margaret, have called a methodology of postmodern emergence (Somerville,
2007, 2008).
A methodology of postmodern emergence emphasises the irrational, messy,
and embodied process of becoming-other-to-ones-self in research
(Somerville, 2007, p. 225). Any process of making new knowledge necessitates opening the self to this process, to the fact that in making new knowledge we will come to inhabit and know the world differently than we did
before (Somerville, 2008, p. 209).
It sounds something like what Libby and Hannah were experiencing.
And you? To what extent was your experience one of opening yourself up to
what was unknown to you before?
Ill try to answer that by reminding you of something else youve written. You
said that this methodology, this opening up (which I think is what Deborah,
Tom, and Maxine Greene are talking about too, by the way) cannot begin with
logic but comes from a place of not knowing, informed by intuition and
responsiveness. I think thats been my attitude. I began with an intuition; Ive
tried to become-other-to-oneself through my responsiveness not only to
Libby and Hannah, but to various theoretical positions which are new to me.
Ive tried to let meaning emerge.
Emergence is an important and under-recognised quality in all research that
aims to generate new knowledge (Somerville, 2007, p. 227).
Its research that works towards an end that is emergent, and not yet in view
(Barone, 2000, p. xi).

Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

Steve:

Margaret:

Steve:

Deborah:

Steve:
Deborah:

Steve:

87

Meaning has emerged in unexpected ways for me, and for us. We began
thinking we were investigating the experience of doubt and disillusion as preservice teachers wrestled painfully with identity-formation. But then we
found ourselves becoming more interested in what was happening to those
affects as we talked together about them. For me and I think for the others
too our interest moved from being intra-psychic to relational. Early versions of the paper had a more traditional shape, structured around looking at
identity-formation through various theoretical lenses. But, as we became
more and more aware of the significance of our conversations, we wanted
to shape the paper differently. We wanted both to present some of the various
perspectives that we had played with, and then, surprisingly to us, to foreground the significance of our conversations.
I think that an epistemology of postmodern emergence embraces multiple
modes of expression, such as stories, song, dance, and paintings, as well as
interviews, academic prose, and so on. The focus is on creation of meaning
from the relationship between the parts (Somerville, 2007, p. 239).
Parts like film scenes in cafes, imagined conversations with people Ive never
met! Even though for me the juxtaposition of the different texts has me
thinking particularly about relationship, community, and conversation, there
are many other readings possible.
Thats how I write ethnography. I try to write against the discourses that bind
the disagreements, the embarrassments, the unsaid, and the odd moments of
uncertainty in contexts overburdened with certain imperatives. I try to do this
by provoking and contradicting multiple voices: the ethnographic voice that
promises to narrate experience as it unfolds, the hesitant voices of participants who kept refashioning their identities and investments as they were
lived and rearranged in language, and the poststructuralist voices that challenge a unitary and coherent narrative about experience (Britzman, 2003,
p. 247).
Im not claiming to be telling the truth, to be describing any fixed or
knowable reality.
From the unruly perspective of poststructuralism, ethnography can only
summon, in James Cliffords terms, partial truths and fictions (Britzman,
2003, p. 244).
The question isnt so much Is this data reliable? Its Are these stories
useful?

Part 3: theoretical perspectives

Four imagined texts
Text 1: a letter from Steves PhD supervisor4
Dear Steve,
Well, its been over 10 years since we worked together, and I gather youve left
psychotherapy, returned for a decade to the secondary English classroom, and are now in
teacher education. Who would have thought!
I enjoyed watching your caf conversation film. Youve been wondering, you say,
about the existence of possible stages in identity-formation and you ask what Donald
Winnicott might have made of it. While education was not his field, he did indeed

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claim to have discovered three recognisable and predictable stages in identity-formation (1971), and it wouldnt be all that difficult to map Libby and Hannahs experiences against these three stages. Youll remember he talked about them in terms of
object relations.
In his perhaps now rather antiquated (yet also poetic, or so I have always experienced
it) language, he suggested that first there is relating to the object, where the object (mother
in the case of the infant, teacher in the case of the student, therapist in the case of the
patient) is experienced as existing within the infants internal world, subject to its
omnipotent control (Winnicott, 1971, p. 11). The object, then, is experienced as a
projection of the subjects internal world.
Second, there is the most difficult period of all, which is to do with playing with the
object, where the object itself becomes transitional, existing at times within the omnipotent control of the infant and at times frustratingly outside of that control.
Finally, the object is placed outside of the subjects omnipotent control. This, says
Winnocott, is a scene with high drama, where first the subject attempts to destroy the
object, and then the object is seen by the subject to have survived the attack, and becomes
independently useful.
There is evidence in the caf discussion of the presence of these three stages. And
perhaps it would be of some comfort to teacher educators if Winnicotts ideas led them to
understand better, and to accept more, the otherwise-incomprehensible attacks they
experience while teaching their students.
But Id like to encourage you to take this a bit further. One of Winnicotts (1971)
greatest contributions was the way he directed our attention to the relationship between
subject and object. Your initial focus, as outlined in your letter to me, was on the possible
existence of stages, and certainly Winnicott would have been interested in this. But I
fancy he would have directed your attention to the role of the object in the unfolding
drama. This identity-formation was not just a solitary intra-psychic evolutionary process;
it was mediated by the object. This was where Winnicott diverged from Freud and Klein
and, to a lesser extent, from Jung.
Perhaps youll find it useful if, instead of trying to name and explore discrete stages in
identity-formation, you look more at the mediating role played by objects such as
yourself.
Best wishes,
Susan

Text 2: extract from conference keynote by Distinguished Scholar, Professor D. Jean

Clandinin
We have just watched the short video on the big screen, the video of the caf conversation,
and I wonder how many of you found yourselves asking the same questions that I find
myself asking.
Will these two fine young teachers still be in the profession five years from now?
What social pressures are they likely to face in their first years in the classroom?
To what extent do our current teacher education practices help prepare young teachers
like Libby and Hannah for the shifting educational landscapes theyre about to encounter?
In my talk today, I want to address each of these questions in turn.
First of all, is it likely that theyll survive their first five years? We can see, from the
video, that these are two resilient and thoughtful young people, both drawn by some sense

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of calling to be teachers. Hannah felt shed found her tribe; Libby was drawn to teaching
because it felt worthwhile. These are just the kind of teachers we want to retain in
teaching, but the statistics are bleak. Here in Alberta (and Im guessing the picture is
not all that different in the rest of Canada, or in Australia), around 46% have left teaching
within four years (Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009, p. 145).
What kind of an educational landscape can Libby and Hannah expect to find
when, next year, they enter the profession as fully qualified teachers? It is a landscape
characterised by rapid and accelerating change, most of it imposed externally rather
than initiated at the school level: accountability measures shaped by a neo-liberal
agenda, social dislocations, new curricula with increasing content demands, quality
teaching imperatives, shifting attitudes towards authority, health and safety procedures,
the threat of litigation, and so on. These are well known, widely documented, and
undisputed (Ball, 2003; Bloomfield, 2010; Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 145; Dahlbeck,
2011; Tocci, 2010).
What is less deeply thought through is the connection between this changing landscape and teacher attrition rates. Occupying the landscape has become, in the evocative
words of the anthropologist Geertz, a matter of trying to conduct our daily business in the
midst of a squall. How will Hannah and Libby cope with the task of teaching adolescents
in the midst of a squall which includes preparing teaching portfolios in order to progress
in the profession, attending Professional Development sessions on anything from teaching
standards to risk management, negotiating the territory between test preparation and
authentic learning, plugging gaps left by sudden resignations, and so on. The problem,
Geertz notes, is that more has changed, and more disjointedly, than one at first imagines
(Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 142).
Both Libby and Hannah have clearly worked hard to shift a sense of themselves-inthe-world. Each has successfully grappled with the pleasurable and painful business of
redefining success, making new connections, entering into the labyrinth of complex
pedagogies unimagined when they began their teacher education.
But is this enough?
In an alternative programme of pre-service teacher education in the late 1990s, Sue
McKenzie-Robblee, a school principal with whom we worked, pointed out that mainstream teacher education programmes, at least in her experience, were so disconnected
from schools as to be mostly out of touch. She said that the facultys heavy emphasis on
how to be a good teacher meaning, how to be good with children in a classroom was
out of touch because it did not help pre-service teachers to attend to the shifting landscapes landscapes that shaped their lives, as well as the lives of children, youth, and
families (Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 145).
And here we come to perhaps the most important question that this short film has
surfaced for me. What is it that sustains teachers in the midst of the squall? What feeds the
spirit, reinforces resilience, supports an adaptive teacher-identity? What can we be doing
both within our teacher education programmes, and as part of our ongoing work with
school communities to create spaces that might keep young teachers like Hannah and
Libby in the profession after five years?
Teachers often speak of being sustained by community and service, through different
kinds of collaborative research communities and through relationships and advocacy with
children, youth, and families (Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 152).
We see some of this in the space created by Steve, Libby, and Hannah as they work
together on this research project.

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A response from the floor to Professor Clandinin, following her keynote address
Professor Clandinin, you have suggested here that the caf conversation stands as some
kind of a model for the kind of relational space upon which teacher education needs to be
constructed.
You (and the school Principal you quote) are right in saying that teacher education is
largely out of touch with the real world, but wrong in implying that the solution lies in
creating collaborative research communities.
What pre-service teachers need is quite different. Teachers are in need of developing
new knowledge and new skills based on sound research.
They need to become adept at dealing with difficult students (Chmelynski, 2005;
Murik, Spinks, Zilber, & Curry, 2005; Smith & Bondy, 2007); be instructed in the
concrete steps needed to build a classroom culture based on respect and rigour (Babkie,
2006; Bartholomew, 2007); become informed about the needs of students of all sociocultural backgrounds (Comber & Kamler, 2004; Kamler & Comber, 2005); know how to
create practical outcomes-based lessons; understand how to teach students with specific
learning needs (Cook, 2005; Konza, 2005/2006); learn concrete techniques for scaffolding
the required literacies upon which their disciplines are built (Moje, 2008; Tovani, 2004);
understand how to engage productively with fellow staff members (Hunter, Rossi,
Tinning, Flanagan, & Maddonald, 2011); learn how to collect the required evidence to
negotiate new professional standards regimes (Kerkham & Hutchison, 2004); use new
technologies to engage students in this increasingly digital world (Hill & Smith, 1998;
Kassens-Noor, 2012; Maor, 2008; Taylor, McGrath-Champ, & Clarkburn, 2012); learn
how to draw on proven theory to navigate their way out of confusing and challenging
classroom events (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009; Nilsson, 2009; Wilson &
lAnson, 2006).
Each of these requires the teaching and learning of specific knowledge and specific
skills. Each of these takes time, commitment, and resources, all of which are precious and
cannot be wasted in no-doubt pleasurable university equivalents of this caf conversation.
Universities all over the Western world are having to do more with less financial
support from government. Thats the reality. Reducing face-to-face time with students and
relying more heavily on distance and online education are an inevitable consequence.
There is no reason why these skills and this knowledge cannot be taught by informed
academics using a blend of online and face-to-face instruction.
It would perhaps serve our struggling early-career students better if academics such as
Steve spent less time looking backwards to a disappearing world and instead more time
equipping his students with concrete survival skills for those fraught early years in the
profession.
Text 3: extract of email from Di Bloomfield to a colleague
Ive just watched the video of the caf conversation that you sent me. Yes, of course I can
guess why you thought Id be interested! Lou, the student I wrote about in my article
(Bloomfield, 2010) was (like Hannah and Libby and so many of the pre-service teachers I
work with) striving to construct a teaching voice. Theyre both borrowing discourses and
at the same time hesitantly attempting to fashion something new (2010, p. 222).
Theres something oppressive, I think, about the humanist assumption of a coherent,
self-actualising self, who can unproblematically develop and be developed through experience and practice (p. 230). Identity-formation, the business of becoming a teacher, is a time
of intense emotion and vulnerability (p. 228). This is palpable in the caf conversation.

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How healthy, how necessary, it is for pre-service teachers to more openly communicate together within pedagogical spaces that encourage exploratory engagement with
versions of experience and possible forms of the teacher and the self (p. 232).

Text 4: a blog post by Steve

Many years ago, when I was still teaching in schools and had only the vaguest notion of
what all this talk about discourse, identity construction, and subjectivities was all about,
Deborah Britzman wrote something which would have made no sense to me at the time,
but which now, especially as I think about my discussions with Hannah and Libby,
resonates very strongly.
Culture is where identities, desires, and investments are mobilized, constructed, and
reworked. It is the site where antagonistic meanings push and pull at our sensibilities, deep
investments, and relationships with others. And consequently there is not one monolithic
culture that communicates unitary meanings. Circulating within and persuading any culture
are an array of contesting and contradictory discourses that vie for our attention. . ..
It is within our subjectivities that we can make sense of these competing conditions even as
these competing conditions condition our subjectivity in contradictory ways. (Britzman,
2003, p. 71)

I like Britzmans insistence that culture is not something that is imposed on us; we all
play an active part in creating it, even if there are conditions conditioning our subjectivity. The self both finds and creates its identity (Bloomfield, 2010; Taylor, 1989).
I wonder if we underestimate, and consequently undervalue, the role of teacher
educators in helping our students take up discourses in an active and informed way
(Adoniou, 2012). I wonder this partly because of the move in universities towards
reducing face-to-face time with students and increasing online teaching. As I was typing
this sentence, an email came through about universities increasing use of distance and
blended education. Im not against the move to work out how to work well online; Im
strongly in favour, actually. But I sense that were making this move while at the same
time letting what we know about Vygotskys zone of proximal development (1978)
become more what we preach than what we practise.
Our students need to have space and time to make sense of the chronologies, but
they need to do this within zones of proximal development, which means having close
contact with others (teachers and other students) who can help them examine assumptions
and add complexity and nuance to current unmediated discourses. This happens when
there is time and space for face-to-face conversation and the forming of real relationships.
It happens in the university equivalent of cafes: in tutorials, lectures, corridors, libraries,
and offices. It happens when university lecturers are closely connected to their students on
their placements.
Im a former English teacher, and of course I know that much of learning is
necessarily virtual, mediated at a distance through the printed and electronic word. Ive
learnt about philosophy through Spinoza (1994), Nietzsche (1994), and Taylor (1989);
about education through Neill (1968), Postman (1996), and Rogers (1969); about psychology through Freud (2006), Jung (1983), and Winnicott (1971); about my many selves
through Dickens (2009), Hillman (1979), and Campbell (1949); about children in classrooms through Holt (1982), Dennison (1972), and Armstrong (1980). Ive never set eyes

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on any of these writers; my identity as a teacher has been partially shaped by virtual
engagements.
But bodies matter. Ive made better sense of all of these writers by discussing them in
places where I listen and am listened to, where I meander into meanings through on-thespot exchanges mediated by body language and inflexions, where I can see faces and feel
presences.
If, as Britzman says, culture is where identities, desires, and investments are mobilised, constructed, and reworked, then the caf and the classroom real not virtual, full of
real bodies bumping into and being shaped by other real bodies are cultural sites.

Part 4: six months on

A short story
Its winter in chilly Canberra, but the caf is warm. Its coffees this time, not beers.
OK you two, get this! says Hannah. You know Ive struggled, at times, with this
new job. Oh my god! Yes, last year I struggled with self-doubt, but this year, now that Ive
got my own classes . . ..
Hannah begins to count on her fingers as she lists the sources of her first-year-out
frustrations.
. . . its marking . . . and lesson planning . . . and school admin . . . and report writing
. . . and detentions . . . and lazy seniors . . . and chatty 14 year olds . . . and 12 year olds that
cry all the time . . . and being sworn at by kids who just want to be liked . . . AND self
doubt!
They laugh. Hannah often makes them laugh, even when theres an obvious serious
edge to the humour.
Libby holds out her hand, and she too begins to count on her fingers.
And all the admin, the insane marking systems, the internet being blocked,
photo-copying codes. And all the different forms and procedures and rules! Its so
time-consuming learning through trial-and-error which rules are the ones to always
follow, which are at your discretion and which ones can be completely ignored. Im
sure there are good reasons for everything, but everyones so busy theres no time to ask
for explanations. So I end up sitting on my own at lunchtimes with my earphones on,
trying to block out the world and get as much done as I can.
Its all the administrivia, Steve says.
Libby is silent for a moment, wondering if thats the whole story, her eyes on the
steam coming from the coffee.
No, thats not all of it. Ive worked in the Public Service, says Libby. Im confident
with my bureaucratic experiences and ability to adapt and make the best of situations. But
teachings not like the Public Service. I keep telling myself that being a teacher is just
doing a job. But its not. Being a teacher means taking on an identity which is far more
personal, significant and vulnerable, capable of inflicting deeper hurt than any of the other
jobs in my life. I thought, maybe naively, that all that work the three of us did last year
around our doubts would have prepared me for my first year, but I have all these new
doubts and questions. Am I preparing well enough? Am I a fraud? Do I have any idea
what Im doing? When will I feel Im ready for this? Teachings not like the Public
Service. There are times when I'm not coping and I want my old job back.
They sit for a while quietly, looking thoughtfully into the distance or at their drinks.
Its Hannah who breaks the silence.

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Sometimes, I feel that last year during our teacher education, we all my friends, the
rest of the cohort, you, the other staff members together we dreamed this lovely little
dream of our ideal world of teaching, and then we got into reality and it was much, much
harder to live. I dont think the dream is irrelevant, even now after all Ive been
experiencing. But when you live in the dream world, and you dont get to test the vision
against reality, when the two do finally collide, it is traumatic.
Again they sit quietly for a while, and then Hannah continues.
I think its part of what Ive struggled to manage in the last little while how much of
this is my life and how much of it is my job, and the whole problem is, of course, that it is
both of those things. You know, Steve, it can be really hard to separate all those
sentiments about teaching who we are with the fact that it can consume you. At times
this year, Ive actually had to tell myself that this isnt a calling and that there comes a
point where it has to be shut off. Ditto the idea of becoming. I think its true that you do
become a teacher, and I certainly think that the Dip Ed helped me become some sort of
better (maybe even best) version of myself. But its like Ive had to limit (this year) my
own expectations of how to live and express this transitioned Hannah. I certainly had a
point a few weeks ago where if I thought I was to be called to anything then maybe it
should have been the cloister and I should pray and garden and read all day. That would
be rather nice, and much less pressure!
Hannah is smiling now.
But, you know, this reminds me, what were doing now, just talking about stuff, this
reminds me of the best bits of uni! Just sitting around, talking about stuff.
I loved that, says Libby. I loved how there was time for us to just talk, to tell each
other what we were experiencing, or how different ideas were stimulating. The intellectual
stimulus: Im missing it now.
I havent talked like this to anyone, this year, says Hannah. It feels good to get it off
my chest. Ive missed our conversations, you know, all that time we spent last year talking
and thinking about doubt and disillusion. Im so glad to be part of this project, and to be
a part of the community that was the Grad Dip. I think we need more of it in our first year
out. I dont know what people are doing who dont have people that they can draw on in
this way. I suppose I just hope that everyone finds it somewhere, though I fear they do
not.
Theres lots about this first year experience that I feel uncomfortable about, says
Libby. But I dont feel as uneasy as I once did about feeling uncomfortable about these
things. And acknowledging youre uncomfortable is a source of control in itself, its
almost empowering. But you need someone to acknowledge it with.
Weve read some Britzman together, Steve says, and what youve both been just
talking about reminds me of something she once wrote. He gets out his iPad, and finds
this:
There is no mind without the others mind. There is no passion without the others passion.
(Britzman 2007, p. 6)

Final words
The argument we are making in this paper is not about whether or not teacher education
needs to be centred around the gaining of particular knowledge and skills. The texts listed
by the responder to Professor Clandinin in Part 3 are all texts which informed, either
directly or indirectly, the Graduate Diploma course that Libby and Hannah completed.

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S. Shann et al.

Our argument is instead about the importance of embodied relationship as students

grapple with new knowledge and skills, and experience the painful adjustments to identity
(Shann, 2011; Shann & Cunneen, 2011).
This project began as an investigation into the possible existence of identifiable stages
in identity-formation, and the theoretical lens provided by Winnicott was an early
illuminator as we tried to come to grips with what we felt we inadequately understood.
While we still feel some gratitude towards Winnicotts reminder that periods of doubt and
disillusion are to be survived rather than resisted, our methodology of postmodern
emergence one that encouraged us to surface discordant internal and external voices
and to allow ourselves to experience, over and over again, the extent of our own
unknowingness and the possibility that new insights might emerge has led us to a
surprising and welcome realisation that, in the words of T.S. Eliot, our end is our
beginning. We began with a conversation, we wrote drafts and attempted to find a
theoretical perspective that illuminated Libby and Hannahs experiences. Then, as we
worked together with Rachel and the journal reviewers on successive drafts of this paper,
we were led unexpectedly back to the regenerative potency of relationships and the
importance of conversations, conversations where complexities are explored, emotions
expressed, and meanings sought.
Its a finding that asks some questions about the plight of young teachers being
initiated into the tribe at a time when their elders are being asked to teach increasingly
large numbers with less face-to-face time.
Methodological postscript
We began with an idea, as we thought about the doubt and disillusion, that perhaps (like
Kubler Ross in her writing about grief) there might be stages in the process of identityreformation that it would be useful to identify and explore. Libby, Hannah, and Steve
discussed the idea, and then Libby and Hannah wrote extensively, both anecdotally about
different moments in their recent experiences, and more analytically as, looking for
patterns, they mapped their experiences against a number of models we had discussed.
Steve took these writings and his records of their conversations, and wrote a draft which
attempted to view Libby and Hannahs experiences through both a structuralist lens
(Winnicott) and a poststructuralist one (Deleuze). Libby, Hannah, and Steve, with
Rachels help, then worked together rewriting, editing, and refining the draft.
Reviewers feedback suggested that while the analysis was underdone, our story was
interesting and a revision would be considered.
As we worked on the revision, we kept finding literature that either challenged or
extended our thinking, and decided that we wanted to completely recast the paper. Our
understanding emerged slowly out of the sometimes uncomfortable silences and states of
unknowingness that we experienced, and so Margaret Somervilles work on methodologies of postmodern emergence struck a particularly resonant chord. Encouraged by the
writing of researchers like Eisner (2002), Barone (2000, 2001, 2007, 2009), Clough
(2002), Britzman (2003, 2007), and proponents of Readers Theatre (Donmoyer &
Yennie-Donmoyer, 1995), we experimented with various authors voices, making them
into characters in our narrative, in order to see what this kind of playful engagement might
evoke in a research process. (Rachel was particularly involved in the writing process here,
reading successive drafts and assisting in the required minor or major surgery.)
Our purpose was both representational (we wanted to suggest that our recreated caf
conversations, for example, described actual thoughts and feelings) and provocative (we

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95

wanted our research project to stimulate thinking in us first, and then in our readers by
highlighting issues in unusual ways).
Notes
1.
2.
3.

4.

Hannah and Libby are co-authors, with Steve, of this paper. Rachel, the fourth co-author, is an
academic who had no direct role in the Graduate Diploma teaching programme. Her role as coauthor is described in the Methodological Postscript section.
The Graduate Diploma of Education, also known as the Grad Dip, is a one year course done
after a students undergraduate degree.
Because we have taken the liberty of making these four academics (and two others in a
subsequent section) into characters in our paper, we sent a copy of the paper to each of them
and asked for their explicit permission to use their ideas and words in this way. All agreed (with
an enthusiasm we found very encouraging). We want to emphasise, of course, that while the
words we have put into each characters mouth were sourced from published writing, and
though we have checked with each author to make sure that we have not misrepresented them,
the words as we have written them are sometimes not direct quotes. We have played with the
expression to fit the more conversational tone.
This is an entirely imaginary letter from an imaginary supervisor, though it does cover some of
the material explored in Steves unpublished thesis, Mating with the world: On the nature of
story-telling in psychotherapy (Shann, 2000). Its purpose here is to provide a bridge between
the structuralist ideas of Winnicott (1971) that influenced our early thinking and the more
relational perspective we ended up taking.

Notes on contributors
Steve is Assistant Professor in Teacher Education. His research interests include the world of the
early-career teacher, the nature of secondary English teaching, and the possibilities of a mythopoetic
methodology.
Hannah is a former Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education student at the University of
Canberra. She is now teaching English in a rural secondary school.
Libby is a former Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education student at the University of Canberra.
She is now teaching both science and humanities units in a Canberra secondary college.
Rachel is Assistant Professor in Teacher Education. She has a PhD in Australian literature and has
taught secondary English.

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Copyright of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.