ERIC Number: EJ1157175
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017
Pages: 15
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1536-3031
EISSN: N/A
Subjects in the Threshold: Opening-Up Ethnographic Moments That Complicate the Novice/Veteran Science Teacher Binary
Wallace, Maria F. G.
Issues in Teacher Education, v26 n3 p96-110 Fall 2017
Traditionally, the humanist narrative of "novice versus veteran teacher" serves as an efficient way to understand and produce an experienced workforce in the current neoliberal educational climate. This standard approach to workforce development has hit science teachers especially hard as they work within a culture of crisis for ensuring competitive Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) preparation for the growing global marketplace. However, this narrative is only one plane within the complex assemblage defining science teachers and science teacher experience. Consequently, this article aims to liberate the "novice science teacher" from traditional modes of knowing, naming, and (re)producing efficient subjects within a neoliberal educative machine. To put theory to work, however, researchers and teacher educators also work differently. Thus, using a feminist poststructural perspective with Deleuzoguattarian concepts of "becoming" and the "threshold" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), in this article the author engages three ethnographic moments shaping the inductive experiences of beginning science teachers. The line(s) of inquiry negotiated in this article expose generative possibilities for "talkers of education" (e.g., the diverse population of teachers, school and district administrators, teacher educators, educational researchers, educational policy makers, students, and parents who often speak about and make decisions regarding educational issues) and "authors of experience" (e.g., educational researchers, who they essentially write the lived experience of others) to move from fixed notions of the novice, veteran, and teacher subject as an epistemological endeavor to an ontological one. More specifically, talkers and authors of education shift modes of understanding novice/veteran science teachers as fixed rational objects to engaging these entities as a living process.
Descriptors: STEM Education, Ethnography, Science Teachers, Experienced Teachers, Beginning Teachers, Neoliberalism, Feminism, Beginning Teacher Induction, Social Justice, School Districts
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A