Complexity and hope : understanding the transition from preservice to in-service literacy teaching

This longitudinal multiple case study followed 14 teachers from their university-based teacher preparation program into their first three years of professional teaching. In the study, I drew on Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001), Expansive Learning (Engeström, 2001), and Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to understand the experiences of the participants as they transitioned into their in-service teaching position. I provided an update of the participants at the end of three years and tracked their general trajectories across their in-service experiences. Next, I used three cases to highlight some of the tensions the teachers experienced, their attempts to resolve these tensions, and the appropriation, adaptation, and abandonment of literacy teaching practices from their university program in their first years of teaching. The experiences of Callie, Riley, and Layla offered three diverse pathways into teaching that reflected many of the experiences of their peers in the cohort. This study’s findings supported previous studies in literacy teacher preparation that have shown the powerful influence of the teaching context, the importance of the support teachers receive in their first years, and the disruptive influence of high-stakes testing. Many of the teachers went through periods in which they abandoned literacy-teaching practices from their preparation program, however they sometimes returned to them in the second and third years. Some of the teachers expressed the need for a professional community in which they could continue to grow as teachers. This led some of the teachers to look outside of their school contexts. I also found that the beginning teachers participated in multiple activity systems in which they played different roles. Even though these systems sometimes led to tensions between their roles that threatened to overwhelm them, these tensions also offered the possibility of new growth and learning. The implications from the study include the utility of activity theory in literacy teacher preparation and literacy research, the need for university teacher preparation programs to continue supporting graduates as they begin their first years of teaching, and the need for colleges of education to examine continually the influence of their programs on their graduates.