Becoming and being a teacher

Abstract This work is an inquiry into my experiences of marginalization as a student and as a teacher and then into those of two beginning teachers, one a science teacher originally from Guyana, and the other an ex-priest who confronted his chief cleric. I compare the operations of hierarchies (families, Church schools, school boards, employing authorities) with those of “poisonous pedagogy” (Miller, 1986). I then contrast them with the caring, relational, responsible and resistant approaches that I have found in the work of Hollingsworth (1993; 1994) and that of other feminist constructivists. I explore an alternative notion of teacher as an “organic intellectual” (Gramsci, 1971) and teacher as prophet (Purpel, 1989). The relational, response-able and caring teacher risks alienation and fragmentation of the self in systems that undermine and devalue subjective ways of knowing. There is a need to look closely at how and why preservice teachers’ perspectives are shaped over time as they participate in the complex social matrices of classroom, school and community. Through the dialogue with my two co-participants we examined the nature of the tensions that surface in the transition from student of teaching to teacher. Our growth in understanding about what it means to become and be a teacher is the particular focus of this study.