We began this research by asking questions about the high number of teachers who leave teaching in their first five years of teaching. The literature on early career teacher attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Guarino, Santibanez & Daly, 2006; Macdonald, 1999; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004) left us with wonders around the experiences of…

This article, which comes out of a research project exploring teaching as intellectual work, focuses specifically on a young woman who worked as a substitute teacher after she graduated from a two-year teacher education program at her local university. For Penny, substitute teaching was an interruption as she shaped a professional life moving…

This article examines the experiences of a cohort of seven urban educators who conducted action research over a two-year period. Of the seven participants, six were teacher-researchers ("TRs") and one was a bilingual coordinator. The author provides an analysis of focus group discussions conducted after the completion of the action research…

This paper presents a study about how schools of education impact their students' ability to be successful in urban schools. What experiences--if any--in teacher education programs shape the development of race-conscious White teachers? To address her goal, the author conducted a qualitative study of six teachers currently employed in urban…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…

Juxtaposes different contexts in a teacher educator's life as kindergarten teacher, doctoral student, and beginning teacher educator, illuminating how these elements shaped her understandings of learning to teach within different contexts and noting how this story can help educators integrate narrative and paradigmatic ways of understanding…

Examines educational experiences of a student teacher who joined a study of how preservice teachers with little classroom experience make sense out of university coursework. The paper presents the student's personal history, her conclusions about what constitutes good teaching prior to enrolling, and resulting conflicts between research-based and…

Presents the story of a teacher educator who observed her daughter, a young elementary teacher, grappling with the ongoing demands of today's classroom, recounting an experience she had while visiting her daughter's classroom that caused her to reflect on her own work as a teacher educator. (SM)