Negotiating psychological disturbance in pre-service teacher education

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Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 675–689 www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

Negotiating psychological disturbance in pre-service teacher education Tony Brown Higher Education Academy Education Subject Centre, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, England, UK

Abstract This article describes the results of studies into the intrapsychic disturbance experienced by student teachers. The process of becoming a teacher is explored in terms of transition and the emergence of a teacher identity. Interview data were developed into case study narratives around the theme of an emerging professional teacher self. The study drew on psychoanalytic theory to interpret the potential conflict between the students’ emerging identity and a historical, nonprofessional self. The fourth and final case study presented here illustrates how one student used an extended piece of personal writing during her pre-service course to explore her emerging teacher identity. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Pre-service teacher education; Transition; Developmental transformation; Power; Identity; Psychoanalysis

1. Introduction I introduce this article with a case study involving a student known here as Merryn. My experience of working as a mathematics education tutor with Merryn brought to my attention for the first time some of the psychological difficulties of identification that students can experience. As a result, I began to think in greater depth about how teacher educators and education programmes can engage more productively with students’ personal–professional agendas of self-development. I wrote up this brief interaction with Merryn as a critical incident (Tripp, 1993). I then provide three further case studies to illustrate different responses to disturbance. The final case study illustrates how a preTel.: +44 117 331 4260.

E-mail address: [email protected].

service course can provide opportunities for a student to tackle issues of psychic disturbance directly. 1.1. Merryn: realising problems of identity Merryn was an undergraduate student teacher in her twenties on a hybrid course that provided a subject qualification at degree level in addition to a professional qualification. Merryn’s specialist subject was mathematics. The professional element of the course qualified her as a primary school teacher. The teaching session reported here took place a few weeks before the end of Merryn’s 4-year course. It suggested to me that a teacher self-emerges within individual students as a consequence of participation in the pre-service course. I suggest that Merryn’s behaviour illustrates the confusion that can accompany the process of becoming a teacher

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and that this confusion is one of identity brought about by the co-existence of potentially contradictory selves. Twelve undergraduate mathematics students in their final year were seated around two tables. I had taught them intermittently during all 4 years. They were generating oral answers to past examination papers in preparation for their final professional exams in mathematics pedagogy. I was walking around the tables, discussing the key responses needed in answer to a pedagogical question about effective strategies for teaching mathematics. Gesticulating in over-enthusiastic response, I managed to strike Merryn quite hard on the side of the head. We both apologised profusely: I, out of embarrassment for hurting her and for not being careful, she (to my surprise), for not being properly attentive (something which I had not noticed). The session then continued until the end of the afternoon, with the incident apparently having caused nothing more serious than some embarrassment for the two of us and great hilarity among the others. When the session finished, Merryn hung back, reluctant to go. When we were alone, she asked if she could talk to me about a problem she had. She then told me very directly that she hated herself and who she had become. She spoke dramatically, bluntly and with urgency. She could no longer be who she used to be, because she had committed herself to becoming a teacher. She had changed her behaviour in several ways; deliberately changing the way she responded to her boyfriend, who had subsequently rejected her, and the way she related to her female friends, who no longer wanted to spend time with her and who were highly critical of her: saying she was ‘offhand’ and dismissive of them. This could be seen as just another difficult late adolescent disturbance except that Merryn then reported that she had to be like she was now, because if she didn’t start ‘behaving like a teacher’ she would be unsuccessful in the future and particularly in the forthcoming round of interviews for jobs: she wouldn’t be able to ‘show them that she was ready for teaching’. She described herself as confused about what she was becoming (reporting that her friends had described her as having become, uncaring, unfriendly, distant), but she couldn’t face the thought of failing to become a teacher after 4 years of training. In a mood of desperation, tearfully, she concluded that she hated the person she had become.

Greenhalgh (1994) argues that there is a particular risk of blocked cognitive, emotional and psychic communication with self and others at crucial points and reminds us that blocked thinking and feeling can lead to:

     

a sense of helplessness; difficulties in concentrating and learning new ideas; a temporary inability to seek help and support from partners, family, peers or course tutors; a loss of critical judgement about how well one is performing in classrooms and relating to others; an inability to tolerate constructive advice and guidance; reduced classroom performance due to temporary insensitivity to others including pupils.

Britzman (1986) suggests that disequilibrium is a ‘necessary condition for transformation, [but] the student teacher tends to deal with disequilibrium as a threatening experience’ (452). Merryn is threatened by the emergence of multiple identities and the difficulties that this multiplicity invites. The disequilibrium comes from the inability to use the emergence of multiple identities as opportunities to extend the range of choice of action. Instead, the multiple identities associated with the different aspects of the teacher’s role are experienced as threats to identificatory coherence. For many students the disequilibrium that can accompany training leads to psychological growth, but perhaps only when the multiplicity of identities offered by the process of becoming a teacher are experienced directly as leading to an expanded, integrated self, more diverse and richer in the possibilities for action that these multiple identities afford. For Merryn disequilibrium leads to splitting rather than developmental transformation. Becoming a teacher is experienced as becoming an increasingly fragmented person. This loss of identificatory coherence prevents or at least hinders a developmental transition because Merryn cannot use the increasing multiplicity in creative ways to engage authentically with her boyfriend, her mates and her emerging role as a qualified teacher. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that the disequilibrium experienced by students is transferred to their school mentors and university tutors through unconscious processes. Tutors are likely to experience transference of the disturbance emanating

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from students. Their response will be shaped in part by their own experiences of transitions and their own anxieties surrounding experiences of identificatory coherence, transformation, loss and disequilibrium. It follows therefore, that tutors and mentors may experience a student’s response to disequilibrium as a disturbance that threatens their own identity as a professional and more generally. The analysis of this episode with Merryn serves a further useful purpose, which is to underline the intention of this paper to avoid presenting psychoanalytic insights as claims to a singular truth. Multiple interpretations of the material are possible. Psychoanalytic interpretations can offer insights into the development of teacher identity and expose some of the implications for teacher education. 1.2. Using Merryn’s example to help develop and analyse critical incidents Merryn’s decision to disclose her concerns was unanticipated. Our discussion surprised and excited me. I felt that a window had been opened onto a previously unseen landscape. I had not been a major contributor to her programme and we had had no personal contact other than the typical contact that had occurred during the few sessions I had worked with her group. This of course could have influenced her decision to talk to me, since I was located on the edge of her associations with tutors and therefore distanced, but had all the power and status associated with what was known as a ‘professional’ course tutor—someone who deals specifically with issues relating to the way teaching in school can impact on those taking a pre-service course. All I felt able to do for Merryn at the time was to give her some general encouragement about not abandoning what she believed in and to suggest that she stay true to her deepest feelings and beliefs: I was unable to do more than listen sympathetically as a substitute tutor and this unscheduled meeting was my last with this group. Merryn and I did not meet again in circumstances where we could discuss this episode, and I have no knowledge of how she responded to this disturbance during the final days of her course or afterwards. Shortly after the episode, I chose to use a critical incidents approach in an attempt to capture what had taken place. Tripp argues for developing incidents into critical incidents by finding ‘a more general meaning and classification/significance for [the] incident’ (p. 26). The incident with Merryn also

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raised immediate ethical issues including confidentiality. I subsequently explored these issues with two colleagues, one female the other male both based in the same faculty, who acted as critical friends throughout the rest of the research period lasting several years. It is also important to be alert to the potential risk that Dadds identifies: We may y be at our most vulnerable when studying closely our own persona as teacher—the images others hold of us and those we hold ourselves. yWe may be entering into processes by which we deconstruct some basic, historically rooted views of ourselves’. (Dadds, 1993, p. 288) I had also associated Merryn’s comments with Mead (1934) and Bollas (1987). Following Mead’s social interactionist theories of self-construction, the teacher self is seen as being shaped through interactions with significant others. We construct our sense of self through our social interaction and in response to the ways in which we perceive that different people have constructed us. Bollas (1987) applies a psychoanalytic perspective that emphasises self-objectification. Bollas argues that we construct an image of ourselves as an inner object, which we can regard critically as both us and not-us. We experience ourselves both as I—the subject who gazes, and me—the object of our gaze. Merryn, it can be argued, gazes upon multiple self-objects, including:

    

the the the the the

person I used to be; person I want to remain; person I hate to be; teacher I fear to be; teacher I want to be.

Merryn’s difficulty, which she experiences as confusion, is that these different aspects of her identity are not experienced as harmonious and integrated, but rather as split and antagonistic: their existence threatens identificatory coherence. The episode suggested that students can experience the emergence of an ambiguous, complex, irreducible and potentially problematic teacher self. I argue that exploring this ambiguous teacher self can be beneficial to students as they try to adapt to the highly complex demands of becoming a teacher. I am not suggesting that tutors engage in the exploration of students’ personal lives: indeed there are many valid reasons for not doing so. But rather I am suggesting that tutors and students involved in

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pre-service courses look for ways in which to engage with issues related to the emergence of teacher identity and the ways in which the current self can be challenged. The disturbance that Merryn experienced can be usefully discussed using psychoanalytic theory. The advantage this gives is in offering a language for asking questions about internal structures, interactions and resistance (Britzman, 2003). Where can Merryn’s resistance be said to lie? What is it she might be resisting? What she says suggests she is resistant to giving up aspects of her historical self, although there is also an implied recognition that the lay person needs to become a professional—so some changes to the self are inevitable. There is resistance to incorporating some aspects of the emerging teacher self, partly because she sees them as impacting detrimentally on her current relationships. She is also resistant to giving up and failing to become a teacher. Merryn’s response to the dynamic of internal and external forces is to develop multiple identities. She experiments with new ways of behaving in response to the disequilibrium but her actions and interactions cause further disturbance and distress. She is unclear about what to do, but does appear to want to find new ways of organising the action she needs to take (Swidler, 1986). It is also possible that her confusion signifies a loss of contact with earlier ways of being. What she seeks can be understood in terms of habitus (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) and also in terms of ‘games of truth’ (Foucault, 2000) which she plays in response to the external forces which define the professional teacher, and which can be said to shape the ‘true’ teacher-self. Foucault’s theories of self and ‘games of truth’ are played out around problems of ‘power–knowledge’. Following Foucault, the discipline of studying to become a teacher places students and teacher educators in a power–knowledge dynamic with several different sources of authority. Authorities attempt to constitute the subject and seek to ‘reveal’ the truth to them. The ‘true’ self is defined in relation to the power–knowledge constituted by each authority. Individuals come to understand who they are as a result of what they learn from those who exercise power over them. For student teachers, power is experienced in very complex ways. External power is experienced via the authority of the tutor, the school mentor, school students, the regulatory practices of the course and through those external groups responsible for

producing the frameworks and criteria for qualification. Power can also be experienced internally as liberating, repressive, exciting, dangerous, confirming, denying and so on, as we respond to teachers and school students, friends and family members who begin to interact with our emerging identity as teacher. To be a professional one has to adapt to fit within changing patterns of professionalisation within the workplace. Increasingly, professionals are expected: to develop certain capacities in a workplace/ organisational environment. These capacities then entitle a person to be identified, by themselves and others, as ‘professional’ y one future trend is clear. For a majority of people y their basic existence and lifeworld will be marked by endemic insecurity. (Kelly, 2003, p. 3) Crucially, power not only defines the self, in this case the professional teacher, but also defines the other—the not-self, the unprofessional. Initially, other is known as different, but subsequently becomes known as deviant. For student teachers like Merryn, the attributes of the ‘true’ teacher self and the deviant teacher self are increasingly defined by the standards, competencies and capacities imported from outside the pre-service course, but exercised through it. There may be an additional source of problems for teachers, trapped within a system that is being pulled in two directions. Education is viewed by many people as a mechanism for maintaining cultural and social standards. It is to schooling the young that many look to, for ensuring the continuity of values and beliefs. In terms of professionalisation however, the workforce of teachers must be effectively trained and deployed efficiently. Teachers are caught between two value systems; one the group that is seen as the guardian of cultural and social processes, the other, a well trained but expendable workforce. ‘The snag’, according to Bauman, ‘is no more how to discover, invent, construct, assemble (even buy) an identity, but how to prevent it from being too tight—and from sticking to the body.’ (Bauman, 1995, p. 89) External definitions of teacher professionalism are ambivalent. Teachers are caught between expectations that they provide the increased flexibility demanded by the new professionalism whilst also responding to restrictive demands to provide

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continuity and stability of cultural and social artefacts and values, e.g. the notorious Clause 28.1 The traditional models of teacher development are models of personal–professional growth. These models appear to be vulnerable to power–knowledge exercised by authorities that define teaching in terms of capacities. The tension arises in part because models of growth imply students can occupy a positive position of ‘not-yet-professional’, whilst Foucault’s analysis suggests that defining teacher professionalism in terms of capacities must lead to this same status being defined in negative terms of difference and deviance. Depending on our perspective, when we look at Merryn, it is possible for some to see ambiguity, complexity and development, whilst others might see difference and deviance—the hallmark of the unprofessional. Of course, it is not a clear dichotomy. It is possible to identify both models operating, in the actions of individual tutors, in the way pre-service courses function, and within government documents. Foucault also reminds us that we find it almost impossible to recognise the forces that have shaped the normative self and led to the ambiguous, developing self-being defined as the deviant other. Sevenhiujsen, writing from a feminist perspective in the context of care giving, is concerned about the conforming effect on human behaviour brought about when other becomes defined as deviant. ‘Difference is y turned into otherness and deviance, suggesting that variety, insecurity and changeability have to be reduced to unambiguous terms’ (Sevenhuijsen, 1998, p. 46). For Sevenhuijsen, the other (the deviant student teacher, the self to be cared for, the informal care-giver) is placed in the ‘shady background of our collective moral conscience, where it represents the repressed other sides of ourselves’: what Bauman (1992) calls the ‘animal’, a term that Sevenhuijsen rejects from her feminist perspective, preferring to identify it as the feminine, ‘that which modern power relations has forced into becoming the voiceless other’. A return to balance according to Sevenhuijsen, requires us to re-engage with the problems of power–knowledge and to challenge professionalism defined primarily in terms of capacity and competence.

1

More accurately Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. A council may not ‘‘promote teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’’.

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2. Extending the theoretical perspective 2.1. Issues of authenticity The experience of working with Merryn did allow exploration of the problems of validity and authenticity that would accompany more systematic enquiry. In the three later case studies involving Nicola, Trevor and Teri, presented below, I tackled issues of authenticity and validity by engaging with the students over time and by offering my interpretations back to them for further discussion. Nicola was a regular member of the groups that I taught. We met many times over a 3-year period to discuss my research and explore her development as a teacher. I regularly received feedback about how and where my interpretations resonated with her experience. Trevor agreed to take part in three semistructured interviews over 2 years as a member of a cohort of eight secondary students that I followed. Analysis and interpretations of each earlier interview was used as a starting point for the subsequent one, in order to work towards interpretations that were more grounded. Teri and I met frequently during the period when she was writing her dissertation. These meetings were followed, after she graduated, by three meetings and by email correspondence where I tested out draft versions of my written account to see if they contained ‘a high degree of internal coherence, plausibility, and correspondence’ to Teri’s interpretation of events (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998, p. 88). 2.2. The development of self As student teachers develop a sense of what is required of them, they adjust to the expectable environment of schools, classrooms, children and university teaching. They develop an assumptive world (Parkes, 1971) and this allows them to:

  

make predictions about demands that will be made on them; manage their studies to coincide with demands made by the various parts of the programme; prepare themselves to meet the challenges they have identified.

What my research suggests is that some challenges are largely unpredictable and difficult to prepare for. Some students are caught by surprise by unanticipated intrapsychic disturbance brought

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about by changes to the self during the transition from student to teacher. Markus and Ruvolo (1989) identify a process of construction of a possible self, different from the now self, which emerges when students are creating personal and professional goals in response to the different aspects of their teacher education programme. In addition to Markus, I suggest that students can also identify with possible selves that appear to be unavoidable but which challenge their values and beliefs. Students may experience their teacher self-developing in ways that they dislike. For example, they may perceive themselves as becoming more authoritarian or bossy than they wish to be. They may also see certain behaviours transferring into more general aspects of their life, as with the aloofness that Merryn experienced. In such cases the new teacher self may be experienced as threatening the integrity of the now self or the historical self. There is a danger of the self being experienced as split into desirable and undesirable elements, with these elements appearing involuntarily within the students’ awareness. For Britzman (2003) a student’s response to the challenge of becoming a professional is bound up with a special form of ignorance: not the ignorance that comes from not knowing about government legislation or constructivist theories of child development and which can be studied as part of a course; but an ignorance that relates to not knowing what sort of teacher one is becoming. Of course we can recognise that this special kind of ignorance is inevitable: since we can never know our future selves for certain. But until it is pointed out, it is likely to remain an unknown known. Sedgwick (1993) alludes to the shame and denial that is often associated with defending against the disclosure of ignorance. There are psychological, social and cultural activities related to ignorance that make it highly charged. The denial of ignorance in relation to self and to what and who we are becoming can entangle us in dramatic ways. This dynamic of psychological forces shapes the life choices that are made and defines to some extent how one engages with the social and cultural forces associated with work-based learning. For Foucault (1988) an important question is how the subject enters into ‘games of truth’. These games of truth are made inevitable because power exercises a legitimising and normalising process over the individual, leading to the emergence of certain constructs of self; as a moral agent, a sexual being, a

learner, and so on. Power leads to people being classified as objects with the ‘truth’ about them being revealed to them. Power produces knowledge and ‘in constituting the subject in these ways, modern power produces governable individuals’ (Marshall, 1990, pp. 25–26). What teacher educators may gain from juxtaposing Foucault’s and Britzman’s arguments is an increased awareness of the likely impact that exploring students’ ignorance of self can have on them. Because teacher education courses regularly assess student performance against highly demanding standards or competencies, the student’s ignorance of their own teacher self is always close to being made public through performance measurement and tutor feedback. So for students, ‘games of truth’ about power–knowledge in relation to the professional self are always being played out. At any time, students have to be ready to acknowledge and address the ignorance of the teacher self that their mentors and their pupils reveal to them or claim for them: and other people’s perceptions of one’s self can be shocking. What can be daunting to the student is the realisation that this particular ignorance has to be revisited, over and over, through living the experience of becoming the competent student teacher and finally, the qualified professional. The dominant logic of teacher identity that has emerged from a culture of defined standards and competencies is less tolerant of difference and ambiguity and appears to have created a metonymic link between notions of difference and being unprofessional (Kelly, 2003). This tendency to deny difference means that other is more easily reconstructed in negative terms, in relation to a universal norm. Where negative associations are strong, my argument is that psychic disturbance is more easily precipitated. One consequence of this psychic disturbance is that students can doubt their current classroom performance, lose confidence and experience ambivalent feelings about completing their course. Since current statistics suggest that 50% of those who embark on qualifying courses in England leave the profession within 5 years of teaching, it may be that issues of professional identity extend beyond the qualifying period and have some influence on teacher retention rates. Psychoanalytic theory argues that splitting is a normal defence against perceived attacks to the psyche (Klein, 1986). One way for the student to defend against attack is to split the disturbance from the self and the programme of study and to project

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the problem onto their own family, partner or close friends. The recipients of the projection are then perceived as owning or exhibiting the unwanted and projected behaviour. This can give some temporary relief to the student by avoiding the need to acknowledge that the source of the disturbance lies within, threatening the self. We can describe projection as wilful ignorance: fulfilling the need not to admit to difficulties (until such time as the inner psychic energies have had the opportunity to mount an internal defence). If the student’s psychic disturbance is relatively minor, (perhaps children’s behaviour in a new class cannot be brought under control very quickly, although the student has experienced no such difficulties previously), then it may be better for the core-self to attempt to protect itself by a wilful ignorance that things are not going well. Thus from this perspective, being in denial is a useful temporary strategy for managing inner conflict and anxiety, since it provides time for personal work to be done to heal the self and regain psychic stability, confidence and self-worth. Merryn’s case illustrates another part of the process of splitting. Her response to becoming a teacher was to experience an increasingly split and fragmented identity. She was unable to cohere teacher identity with her current identity. 3. Research approaches Much of the research into the growth, development and transformation of teachers and student teachers during teacher education programmes, has focused on cognitive, pedagogical and affective perspectives (Borich, 1995; Bullough, Knowles, & Crow, 1991; Diamond, 1991; Nias, 1989, 1993; Saltzberger-Wittenberg, 1983). Some researchers have sought to encourage the student voice (Poirier, 1992) through the production of narratives in relation to student teacher education (Beattie, 1995; Gudmundsdottir, 1997; Knowles, 1992). Less widespread is the study of teaching, learning and classroom experiences from a psychoanalytic perspective (Blanchard-Laville, 1991; Britzman, 1998; Cohler & Galatzer-Levy, 1992; Pimm, 1994; Weyl-Kailey, 1985). Coren (1997) has made a valuable contribution to discussions about student experience in higher education. The use of psychoanalytic models to explore student and teacher experience in education is increasing. Britzman (2003) makes use of the term ‘psychopedagogy’ as a perspective from which to view different construc-

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tions of education, teachers and pedagogy. Several French studies make use of psychoanalytical theory to explore interactions within classrooms, (Blanchard-Laville, 1991, 1998; Chaussecourte, 2001). 4. Methods The methods used in the main part of my research study were developed over time and were intended to generate well-grounded rich descriptions of student experience (Miles & Huberman, 1994). From 1993 to 2002, I carried out a series of studies with different students and student groups to explore the nature of the disturbance that student teachers experience during pre-service teacher education programmes and beyond, into their teaching careers. I used an interpretive approach to analyse data derived from in-depth, semi-structured interviews, which were tape-recorded with the consent of the participant. Initially, I used a social interactionist perspective which draws on accounts of: culture and discourse, (Vygotsky, 1979) familial and cultural influences (Geertz, 1973), culturally-based ‘appropriation’ (Leont’ev, 1981), reflective practice (Scho¨n, 1983) and what it is to feel like a teacher (Nias, 1989, 1993). However, I found this approach limiting. The phenomena that engaged me most were the internal narratives of student teachers emerging from their intrapersonal experience. Their narratives often referred to emotional trauma arising from competing desires, which carried potentially destructive consequences. Many narratives related to a desire to develop a coherent and effective teacher identity through a process of ‘becoming’. For some participants this process created a sense of vulnerability, with students experiencing a loss of identificatory coherence through the complex and perhaps unavoidably contradictory demands of training. For some participants in the study, the developing teacher self appeared to threaten earlier identificatory coherence. I needed to develop a conceptual framework and language that could address students’ intrapersonal conflict whilst also acknowledging the highly interactive and social nature of the various contexts in which students train. Although I sought a synthesis of these various research perspectives, this has yet to be fully achieved. The concept of self for example, which is central to this work, can be framed in socio-cultural, Foucauldian, post-modern

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feminist as well as sociological perspectives, each with its particular referents, terminology and assumptions. I frame this work in terms of continuing dynamic interaction, which can be viewed through two different but complementary professional lenses. One lens provides definition to social interaction and its associated language, the other to unconscious psychological processes, internal narratives of disturbance and psychoanalytical perspectives. The use of psychoanalytic theory and its conceptual language was useful in theorising the internal psychological processes associated with identification with a teacher self. Students’ perceptions of volition were related to the dynamic interplay of intrapersonal forces. The ability to take responsibility for one’s actions, to make decisions and to challenge the decisions of others, was shaped to some extent by students’ own perceptions of their historical, current and future identity. Agency is determined reflexively through one’s inner identifications with the actor who wishes to act. In order to address problematic issues of validity and authenticity, the analysis of data and the development of narratives necessitated further meetings with participants wherever possible, to allow for continuing exploration of key themes and to problematise interpretations. The interview process was intended to provide me and the participants with opportunities to search for resonance and to establish narratives that had some shared meaning for us through negotiated explanations that achieved internal consistency and accorded with other facts (Alasuutari, 1998). In longitudinal studies there are greater opportunities for narratives to coalesce around a flowing chronology, allowing a greater opportunity to tackle hermeneutic composition (what Bruner refers to as one of the nine universals of narrative realities). No story has a single, unique construal. Its putative meanings are in principle multiple. y The objective of hermeneutic analysis is to provide a convincing and non-contradictory account of what a story means. y the meanings of the parts y are ‘‘functions’’ of the story as a whole, and, at the same time, the story as a whole depends for its formation upon constituent parts y A story’s parts and its whole must y be made to live together. (Bruner, 1996, p. 137)

5. Participants Merryn was an undergraduate student in her early twenties studying on a 4-year course that combined a professional qualification to teach in primary schools with a specialist subject taken to undergraduate degree level. Merryn’s specialist subject was mathematics. Nicola, a student in her mid-thirties followed the same 4-year programme, with art and design as her specialism. Nicola participated in several interviews over the last 3 years of her course. Trevor was a student following a 1-year programme for teaching mathematics in secondary schools. He agreed to take part in three interviews, two during his course and a further interview 2 years after successfully completing the programme. Teri was a mature student in her late twenties who followed a 4-year programme for teaching in primary schools. Her previous career had been in business and commerce. Teri and I met on several occasions after she successfully graduated and these meetings form the basis of the final case study presented in this article. 6. Nicola, Trevor and Teri 6.1. Nicola: negotiating threats to the now self Nicola’s narrative creates its own space for personal exploration. As she speaks, she gathers herself up, bit by bit and works through important themes in ways, which allow her to look over and over again at what constitutes herself. She relates aspects of her life course with observations about her emerging teacher self; bringing perceived threats into awareness, then exploring them through discussion. Nicola’s narrative powerfully demonstrates the role that language and metaphor can play Martinez, Sauleda, and Huber (2001) in the active construction of the self. In the following section of transcript taken from an interview near the end of the pre-service programme, Nicola reviews her changing attitudes, starting with her arrival on the course (which followed a disappointing week-long placement in a radiography unit at a local NHS hospital). Nicola: So I was really disillusioned and I had to say no, [to radiography training] so then it was, right, what can I do, that’s going to give me a profession? To um, that I feel I can grow and

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move on in, and develop even, you know, something that I was really going to enjoy, and really there weren’t any choicesy I’ve got a family, I’ve, you know, I couldn’t go off to Brighthaven or whatever. There was only College. You know, so I thought well I’ll do that. Then in the first year I thought well yeah I, because on the interview, I probably told loads of lies, ‘‘Do you really want to teach?’’ ‘‘Oh yeah I’d love to teach! I’ve always wanted to teach!’’ You know. And um, I think Geraldine, smelled a bit of a rat on the interview, you know because y she said, ‘‘I really think you ought to go out into schools, and you know, perhaps you know, get a bit more of an idea what it’s all about.’’ But anyway I got in and the first year I did think, yeah I think this is what I want to do. The second year, um, perhaps a few doubts started to creep in, mostly about the theory and the practice of it. I felt there were differences there about what College is saying and what it was actually like. There were obvious problems there, but not just for me. I think even for people that had come in desperately wanting to teach, you know, they might have thought um you know, this is, they’ve come in probably from another angle. Having been in schools and seen what it was really like. I hadn’t done that so they came into College and listened to and absorbed all this theory and thought, ‘‘Oh what a load of rubbish all this is, it’s not really like that’’. Whereas, I was listening to the other end of it, ‘‘This is what it’s going to be like for you, and this is what you will do.’’ And then when I went out there, I saw it was different, so we’re all seeing these differences but from different perspectives, having gone in at different, with different wants and needs. But um, the third year I’ve got doubts that are more personal to me. Um, because I think that Mrs. Williams, the two lectures that we’ve had with you, and the maths, have been particularly interesting to me because I do think that now I’m starting to question whether or not I can actually go out of here, still with a bit of me left, that’s not going to be infected or affected I mean. You know, you could use either of those words really. When I first started, P. [husband] would read all my work, really involved, supportive. He built our house, everything, designed it, the whole lot but he thinks he’s stupid. He won’t read at anything I do now. We’ve grown apart and I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring us back

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together. I’m living away at the moment and maybe we can get back. I’m not sure. Nicola perceives the course both as the source of disturbance and to some extent as a source of help in questioning whether she can finish with ‘a bit of me left, that’s not going to be infected or affected’. The infection appears to have touched most of her historical-self, leaving her feeling that she is in possession of very little of her original being. She is in mourning for the loss of her historical-self and her marriage. She recognises that her partner’s changing responses towards her also signals his sense of that loss. A familiar self has become unfamiliar and the teacher self is being responded to with ambivalence: a somewhat unwelcome replacement for the self that is now unavailable. And yet the motivation to begin the course was also a motivation for change, a desire for difference, a change to her way of being or habitus (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The juxtaposition of historical and teacher selves invests the teacher self with a huge responsibility. Just prior to this meeting, Nicola had left the family home and it was a full year before she was able to return to her husband and children. The very demands that professional courses of study make—the academic writing, the theorising about learning and teaching, the development of classroom expertise, for example—can contribute to estrangement, an unanticipated result of becoming different. Nicola was committed to her personal agenda of self-organising (Swidler, 1986) whilst being aware of the risk to her immediate relationships. Not surprisingly, given the timing of this case study discussion, the development of Nicola’s teacher self is strongly associated with infection and loss. In reading Nicola’s discourse, the implication is that in developing a powerful teacher self, one risks that the power necessary to preserve personal relationships and marriage, passes to others and that consequently one is adrift, at least for a while. 6.2. Trevor: unbearable identificatory compromise Trevor successfully completed a 1-year pre-service programme and began teaching in a secondary school as a mathematics teacher. He reported having enjoyed working in his teaching practice schools but found the daily experience in his full time post increasingly disturbing. He resigned

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towards the end of the first year of full time work. The excerpt below is taken from an interview 1 year later. He had continued to teach, but from home as a private mathematics tutor, supplementing his income by writing and selling computer software. Trevor enjoyed giving accounts of his life, preferably from a cynical perspective. He disclosed little of his past during any of the three interviews. He recounted a few of the facts of his childhood, such as the location of the family home, but never commented on family relationships. In this final interview I asked whether he had ever been bullied as a pupil. He said he couldn’t remember anything significant, just ‘the usual stuff that everybody gets’. Nevertheless, one is left with the impression that bullying and violence were important themes for him. Trevor: I was always on their backs, nothing to do with maths but other stuff that I didn’t believe in, doing the school bit, uniform, being on time, that sort of thing. I could keep them busy. I liked them but I didn’t see the real them. I was playing at teacher and they played at being a certain kind of kid. I learned what to do on the course but what I had to do wasn’t me. Sure it was noisy some times and I wasn’t always organised enough. I didn’t like the bullying. They bullied each other. Teachers bullied them. Some teachers bullied me—well, nagged me to do things in their way. Sometimes I felt bullied. It was all this unnecessary stuff. It was a barrier to working with them. I got good work out of them. Now I see them after school. That suits everyone. I get paid, they come because they want to or their parents do. I won’t take them on if they don’t really want to be here. I can do maths with them and they learn to pass the tests. Some don’t get on in school, I can help them. I don’t waste my time with kids who don’t want to be in class. I don’t have to get heavy with them for not wearing their school tie. For Trevor the teacher self was never a welcome development. He identified the official or ‘true’ teacher as the one who principally manages and controls children. He saw his own self as deficient and deviant. He is ambivalent about blaming. Personal criticism ‘I was always on their backs’, ‘I was playing at teacher’ ‘Sure it was noisy some times and I wasn’t always organised enough’ appears alongside criticism of the school and schooling, with Trevor required to do ‘stuff that I didn’t believe in’

‘It was all this unnecessary stuff. It was a barrier to working with them.’ There is a sense of personal fragility that I experience reading Trevor’s commentary. One way in which he appears to be protecting himself is to project the difficulties he faces into the school. ‘I see them after school. That suits everyone. I get paid, they come because they want to or their parents do.’ By implication, he can work effectively with school students; it is the school environment that prevents this from happening. Perhaps taking this position avoided a more direct engagement with his discomfort about the conflict that abounds in school settings. For Trevor, the school setting appears to have become unreal, unable to offer him what he wanted in terms of professional relationships; ‘I didn’t see the real them. I was playing at teacher and they played at being a certain kind of kid.’ Interestingly, he spoke very little about his relationships with other teachers. 6.3. Teri: using the pre-service course to integrate different aspects of the self This case study covers the period 2000–2002. In autumn 2000, at the start of the final year of her course, Teri successfully completed a 12-week teaching practice where she was fully responsible for a single class of children. She completed this work to a high standard and was commended by both the school and course tutors. Her official success masked the fact that during this period she experienced profound personal disquiet. In the spring of 2001, she completed an extended piece of writing after which she graduated. I was her tutor for this 12 000 word dissertation module. Teri knew that potentially this was a public piece of writing: copies of all dissertations graded above 70% are lodged in the institution’s library for public access. The dissertation requires students to explore any issue of the student’s choosing that arises out of their experience of teaching. Teri chose an in-depth reflective study of psychic disturbance associated with her development as a teacher. Over the 3month study period she explored:

 

her experiences during the pre-service programme; her final teaching practice (which had provoked considerable distress when she found herself

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unable to defend children she thought were being unfairly treated by staff); the conflict she experienced between what she came to call her ‘submissive self’ and her ‘mouthy, opinionated self’; strategies for beginning the integration of her fragmented self.

Teri set the agenda for meetings with me. We tended to meet for about an hour each week when ideas were flowing, and less often when she was preoccupied with other things. She occasionally summarised her most recent writing in note form prior to a meeting. Sometimes she brought questions that she wanted us to work on. On several occasions she came with nothing to report other than feelings of being stuck or with material, such as a recent dream which was preoccupying her. My role was mainly that of the listener. Teri rehearsed her arguments and reported links between her ideas and the reading she was doing. I was able to provide guidance about the formal structure of the dissertation and suggest strategies for organising her material. The way we worked together was typical of the practice in the institution. A proportion of Teri’s writing was not shared with me and did not appear in the final version of the dissertation. Her grade of over 80%, awarded by an external independent examiner, was one of the highest awarded in recent years and is a testament to Teri’s scholarship and thorough grasp of her area of study. The discussion reported below is taken from a series of emails written at the start of Teri’s first term as a qualified primary teacher in the autumn of 2001. Teri: I’ve been looking at the dissertation and the critical incidents, to see if I can see some categories. I think y it is more like an unconscious rediscovery of aspects of myself. I can identify with the children’s distress, which I think may be caused by it resonating with echoes from my own childhood, although I was not aware of this pre-dissertation-wise. What prompted the choice of topic? Teri: I really don’t feel like I had a choice. y I wasn’t sure exactly why I decided to explore my values, beliefs and assumptions. I knew I didn’t want to stop recognising and feeling angered by unjust [classroom and school] situations, but I was also starting to feel unable to deal with them. It’s hard to explain, but I was beginning to feel

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totally overwhelmed by how horrible and pointless it all was. y What has changed since you started work as a qualified teacher? Teri: I y understand the roots of my overwhelming sense of responsibility for everything. The responsibility is still there, but I feel like it’s now more ‘centred’, like things are more focused. I’m also beginning to understand the parts of my self that I have buried and why I had buried them y It’s difficult to explain how I feel. I just feel more ‘open’ and like I can breathe deeply instead of gasping for air with the top of my lungs. How do you see yourself now? Teri:yultimately, the ‘teacher’ cannot be separated from ‘me’. My self is the matrix on which the teacher is built and if the matrix is rocky, the teacher is also. And, as I’ve said, the teacher affects the child’s self-esteem in a very subtle, but important way. I’m beginning to understand the parts of my self that I have buried and why I had buried them. Some were recent ‘burials’ that have taken place since I began teacher training, and what prompted the whole study, was a series of unanticipated and traumatic ‘dis-interments’, many of which occurred during the teaching practices in school [as a student]. Teri: During this final period on the course, I began a series of apparently unrelated dreams featuring animals. I chose to include a study of my dream material in the dissertation, this required me to consider each of the animals in my dreams as some aspects of my self that I had suppressed and split off from my persona. The process of self-study was spurred on when you asked me in one of our meetings what sort of person I wanted to be. My reply was, ‘‘Serene and wise.’’ Then you asked me why? And I told you about the bits of me I couldn’t understand: the mouthy and opinionated bits. y What comes first? The disturbance which leads to transformation? Or does the transformation which begins to happen, create disturbance? Or both? Teri: y I think it may be possible that the teacher-self that was emerging, (the silent one that could not/did not reach out and protect the child), was formulated by repressing the urge to protect the child, and may have been an unconscious attempt to avoid confronting my own painful memories. I was certainly ‘shut-off’ by the emotions that I was experiencing and tried to construct a teacher-self that matched my

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powerlessness to intervene (i.e. one that told myself that it was wrong, unprofessional, to interfere). Teri: And as this teacher-self was formed by the mechanisms of repression and suppression, this caused me further disturbance. y It’s like the loss of identity, (the brave, mouthy me) is like a secondary cause to the disturbance. I couldn’t recognise the relationship that these incidents had with my own past, though, until I had explored the teacher-self that I was becoming. We can see from the narrative above that a dynamic can exist between a nurturing and a chastising or critical self. This is a source of difficulty for many trainees. Dreams provided a warning of unanticipated additional psychic work that Teri thought needed to be done. The dream material suggested to Teri there was a need to work on integrating split-off elements of the self. Teri worked on the dream material by trying to find ways to acknowledge and re-integrate the split off parts of herself. She experienced a desire to be serene and wise, but the price to be paid was the loss of powerful qualities—‘the mouthy and opinionated bits’ which could speak out about injustices. Neither the serene and wise persona nor the mouthy opinionated one could provide everything that Teri wanted for her professional teacher self. She experienced a lack of wholeness and integration and without integration she found it impossible to act on behalf of certain children. To achieve integration, unresolved feelings of having been treated unfairly as a child needed to be acknowledged. Teri’s own angry child needed to be integrated as a legitimate part of the self. 7. Interpretations of the students’ experiences The process of becoming a teacher can be articulated as a developmental transition involving multiple identities as an emerging teacher self interacts with an historical self. I argue that power– knowledge relations and the perceived choices for action are determined in large part by the extent to which the transition to a teacher self is experienced reflexively as a developmental transformation. For Trevor and for Teri the disturbances associated with becoming a teacher appeared to resonate in strong and disruptive ways with earlier experiences in and around education and schooling. Some aspects of these earlier experiences appeared to be unresolved when these students embarked on their

teacher education programmes. Their position in relation to the power–knowledge (Foucault, 2000) of teachers in school was particularly problematic. Power was experienced via an ‘authentic teacher’ in the school setting. This was a power relationship that Trevor never resolved and which Teri successfully addressed only towards the end of her course and in her first year of teaching. In her remarkably perceptive account, Teri was able to illustrate how she overcame the splitting of identities that occurred during her training, and in her first year following qualification. It was during this period that she first became able to draw upon previously dissociated aspects of her self; ‘the selfopinionated bits’. She gradually built a more integrated teacher self from the dissociated partselves that existed earlier. She reclaimed the voice that could speak with authority to teachers about children’s experience of injustice. For Nicola and Merryn the training programme itself seemed to be a main source of disturbance. Merryn appears to have intuited that in order to play out the role of the successful teacher she had to become a very different person. She found the increasing multiplicity of identities disturbing and failed to integrate the associated disruptive forces. The process of becoming a teacher threatened her core identity and ruptured her current friendships. She felt lost, alone and disappointed with who she had become. She couldn’t learn to love the multiplicity of identities that emerged at that time, she lost some aspects of her subjectivity and in doing this she lost who she was. Merryn’s case study cannot be seen in terms of developmental transformation although we cannot assume that she does not desire change and transformation, nor that she did not manage it at a later date: only that at that point in time the disturbance evoked great anxiety about what the identity of a teacher involves. Nicola worried that she might be criticised for not being entirely honest that her motives on entry to the programme were confused and complex. She found her developing teacher self rejected by her partner. She experienced feelings of being infected by the programme and wondered whether any part of her earlier self would be left intact. 8. Towards a psychopedagogy of initial teacher education What is required for the experience of becoming a teacher to be located more centrally within the

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pedagogy of pre-service teacher education? Within the contextual boundaries of this research, students and their tutors (including me, initially) tended to see students’ problems in managing the transition to teacher as entirely a student issue, not as part of the initial teacher education curriculum. At the outset, I tended to normalise the process of becoming a teacher in ways that associated successful completion of the programme with a relatively smooth, unproblematic process of acquiring a teacher identity. Although unarticulated, I unconsciously defined the ‘better’ or more fortunate students, as the ones who had fewer problems. My unspoken assumption was that the ‘better’ the course, the smoother and less problematic the students’ learning is likely to be. The language, the power dynamics and dominant perspectives of pre-service teacher education continue to privilege models of knowledge and skills transmission from tutor to student teacher and from student teacher to school student. The dominant language of course design and delivery can focus almost exclusively on cognitive and behaviourist models, define learning only in terms of outcomes rather than processes and legitimise only the narrowest of measures of school students’ and student teachers’ learning. To the extent that theories about learning how to teach exclude the learners’ engagement with self and the psychological disequilibrium that accompanies the developmental transition to teacher, current theories limit opportunities for students, tutors and mentors to engage with fundamental processes of acquiring a functional teacher identity. At a time when the school curriculum is being revised to encompass exploration of how we become citizens, and what constitutes personal, social and moral development, it is ironic that the official curriculum of initial teacher education largely employs the language of subject knowledge acquisition and teaching standards. Important as they are, the dominant rhetoric privileges certain discussions and excludes certain others, among them how to engage with the challenges experienced by students as they acquire a teacher identity. Currently, the games of truth focus on subject knowledge, effective performance in the classroom, and the smoothing of knowledge transfer, without permitting exploration of why and how becoming an effective teacher is a problematic process. The creation of a ‘psychopedagogy’ (Britzman, 2003) would privilege:





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discussion of initial teacher education programmes as transformative experiences which can be used developmentally but which are necessarily perceived as problematic; inclusion of students’ narratives of transition to teaching as a legitimate part of the curriculum.

The adoption of a psychopedagogy challenges the assertion that learning can and should be smooth and unproblematic. The current pedagogy marginalises discussion about the awkwardness of learning. Lacan observed that we have a passion for ignorance, and this is particularly apt when discussing psychological barriers to teaching and learning. The development of a psychopedagogy demands engagement with our passion for ignorance as learners and our innate hostility to learning. This phenomenon becomes a legitimate subject of enquiry rather than remaining framed in terms of the success or failure of student teachers, schoolteachers and university tutors to successfully engage learners in smooth untroubled learning. ythe expectations and anticipations that one brings to teacher education work as a defense against accepting ideas that insist upon the complexities and uncertainties of teaching and learning (Britzman, 2003, p. 74). Engaging with a psychopedagogy would necessitate shifts in power relations between student and tutor and would ascribe the developmental transition from student to teacher a central position within the teacher education curriculum where students’ own narratives of learning to become a teacher would necessarily feature in the curriculum. The notion that students should be ‘working through’ their experiences of becoming is central to an assumption that the ability to transcend disruptive experiences like those that Merryn experienced leads to personal growth and greater effectiveness as a teacher. A traditional pedagogy locates engagement with Merryn over her personal and professional experience of becoming a teacher on the margins: a mentoring or pastoral care issue, rather than a curriculum issue. Obviously there are sensitivities to be observed for all concerned in placing the disequilibrium of learning more centrally than at present. A psychopedagogy is less likely to position Merryn as failing to achieve a smooth (and therefore good) transition. Rather it positions her as a typical learner who experiences resistances and ambivalence to certain aspects of her

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learning experience. These can be theorised and worked through since they are elements of a psychopedagogical curriculum. Opening up the curriculum to a pedagogy that acknowledges unconscious processes does not imply psychoanalytic therapy. There is a clear and important distinction to be made between psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis as therapeutic practice. What this paper seeks to do is to use psychoanalytic theory to theorise unconscious psychological processes in relation to professional training as developmental transformation. A psychopedagogy privileges student and tutor narratives of transformation of the self as curriculum elements and the exploration of the disequilibrium that is associated with acquisition of a professional identity.

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