THE REHEARSAL AND THE PERFORMANCE: INTERACTION OF BIOGRAPHICAL AND SITUATIONAL FACTORS IN BEGINNING TEACHER ENCULTURATION Paper presented at the 1994 AnnualConference of the Australian Association for Research in Education Newcastle 29 November 1994 Graham Nimmo & David Smith Faculty of Education Queensland University of Technology Kelvin Grove Campus Victoria Park Road Locked Bag No 2 Red Hill Q 4059 AUSTRALIA Telephone: (07) 864 3421/3228 Facsimile: (07) 864 3981/3987 INTRODUCTION This paper draws on data obtained in a longitudinal ethnographical study of the enculturation of four beginning secondary school teachers in Queensland state schools. The paper focuses on the enculturation of two of the teachers whose experiences demonstrate the often complex interplay of biographical and contextual factors involved in beginning teacher enculturation. The central purpose of the paper is to illustrate the limitations of two contrasting conceptual frameworks of beginning teacher enculturation and to argue that an interactionist model is better able to account for the enculturation processes evidenced in the two teachers. Teacher enculturation may be viewed in terms of two broad perspectives, teacher socialisation and teacher development. Teacher development perspectives tend to emphasise the existence of identifiable stages in the process of professional growth while socialisation perspectives stress the role of colleagues and workplace culture in the enculturation of beginning teachers. Both perspectives find some support in the burgeoning literature on beginning teaching. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Enculturation as a Socialisation Process Teacher socialisation has been conceptualised as taking place not only during preİservice education and through the early professional experiences of the novice teacher, but also through those experiences which precede preİservice teacher education. Zeichner (1986:25,26), for example, highlights the powerful influence of biography on teacher socialisation, noting at the same time that little is known about the particular sources of this influence. Goodson (1992) claims that studies of teacher enculturation tend to focus too heavily on the teacher's practice, whereas a more appropriate approach would concentrate on the teacher as a person. Noting that teachers' backgrounds and life experiences are idiosyncratic and unique, Goodson (1992:114) advocates a `capturing of the teacher's voice' in a way that will illustrate the importance of the teacher's biography in the enculturation process. A major component of biography in this context is the anticipatory teacher socialisation of the beginning teacher's own school experiences. Thus Lortie (1973:487) `suggests that the protracted exposure to potent models [during teachers' own schooling] leads teachersİtoİbe to internalise (largely unconsciously) modes of behaviour which are triggered in later teaching'. A large proportion of the teacher respondents in his Five Towns study (Lortie, 1975) testify to the important influence of former teachers in their own approach to teaching. Recruits bring to teacher education programs implicit theories and exemplars about teaching which owe their origins to an `apprenticeship of observation'. This preparation, claims Lortie (1975:67), favours continuity rather than change, and a corresponding strongly biographical orientation to pedagogical decision making. Britzman (1986) similarly refers to the role of compulsory mass education as an exemplar in making teaching one of the most socially familiar professions, arguing that prospective teachers bring to teacher education their implicit institutional biographies İ the cumulative experience of school lives İ which, in turn, `inform their knowledge of the student's world, of school structure, and of curriculum' (Britzman, 1986:443). Another source of teacher socialisation is the preİservice teacher education course undertaken although, according to writers such as Zeichner and Tabachnick (1981), its impact is uncertain. Debate on the role of preİservice education in socialising recruits reflects different views of teaching and teacher education. In polarised terms, those who see teacher education as equipping novices to fill existing job specifications support a technicist, `what works' approach. Those who want teachers to be change agents who critically evaluate current practices favour a more socially critical theoretical approach. Both positions demand that attention be given to the role of teacher education in the teacher socialisation process. Hence, whilst there is some disagreement about the precise effects of university teacher education, we can no longer assume the neutrality which explanations of anticipatory teacher socialisation allowed. The impact of teacher education should be regarded at least as problematic, rather than taken for granted as reactionary, liberalising, a wasteland or a washİout. (Martinez, 1992:60) The extent to which student teachers' practicum experiences contribute to socialisation into the culture of teaching is problematic. Not only are field studies a significant part of all preİservice teacher education courses in Queensland tertiary institutions but, typically, these practicum experiences are also identified by teachers as the most valuable part of their course. While the salience of the practicum experience probably heightens its impact upon the preİservice teacher, it should not be forgotten that practice can be very diverse, and the degree of support and types of demands placed upon him/her extremely varied. Kagan (1992:150) argues that practica `appear to be structured idiosyncratically according to the kind of relationship that develops between a novice and a seasoned teacher who acts as host'. While the practicum is a period of supervised induction, its usefulness as a powerful agent in initiating beginners into their career is limited by its idiosyncratic nature. Most schools have an induction program to help ease new teachers into the profession. Formal induction programs may contribute to teacher socialisation but their influence is limited and variable (Smith, Cook, Cuddihy, Muller, Nimmo & Thomas, 1991). The informal influence of colleagues is likely to be more important but the professional isolation of teachers is relevant in this regard. Several writers, including Denscombe (1982), Little (1990), Lortie (1975), Nias (1989), and Zeichner and Tabachnick (1986), attest to the individualistic nature of teaching. Because of the `cellular organisation' of schools (Lortie, 1975:72), teachers are isolated and insulated for the majority of their working day from one another's work. The physical separation of teachers into selfİcontained classrooms can also mean professional, psychological and social isolation. It lessens the degree to which teachers are able to develop shared professional knowledge and values. Thus far, theoretical frameworks emphasising teacher socialisation have been examined. While these theoretical frameworks give differing emphasis to particular socialising contexts, ranging from experience prior to preİservice education to beginning teaching, they tend to view beginning teachers (or student teachers) as relatively passive agents in the socialisation process. A contrasting theoretical perspective is that underpinning models of stage development. While no fully developed theory of teacher development exists (FeimanİNemser & Floden, 1986), in essence, stage theory views the teacher enculturation process as an invariant sequence of orientations towards teaching as practitioners gain experience. Thus teachers `develop' by passing through a series of predictable `stages'. The manner in which this occurs is dependent on a number of factors and consequently the time taken to move through one stage and into another varies among individuals. Enculturation as a Developmental Process: `stage' theories Among the better known stage theories of teacher development are those of Fuller (Fuller, 1969; Fuller & Bown, 1975; Ryan, 1986; Marshall, Fittinghof & Cheney, 1990; and Berliner, 1988). The number, duration and labelling of stages differ from theorist to theorist. Thus Ryan, for example, building on the theory of Fuller and Bown, distinguishes four stages: a fantasy stage (preceding school teaching), a survival stage, a mastery stage, and an impact stage. Berliner distinguishes five stages viz. novice, advanced beginner, competent teacher, proficient teacher, and expert teacher. While there is no uniformity, there is a large degree of consistency in the way stage theorists account for the process of beginning teacher professional development. Having reviewed 40 `learningİtoİteach' studies, Kagan (1992) refutes criticism that this literature is too idiosyncratic to provide generalisations about the process of teacher development. She claims that the studies yield `remarkably consistent themes that partially confirmed and elaborated both Fuller's and Berliner's models' (Kagan, 1992:130). Nevertheless, while the notion of being able to explain teacher development in terms of a series of identifiable stages has some appeal, doubt must exist as to the precise nature of the actual stages themselves. Developmental stages are not observable entities with waterŞtight boundaries. In practice, the difficulty of determining an individual's precise stage of development should help dissuade us from casting teachers in rigid, overly simplified categories (Levine, 1989:85). The notion of progress through and across the stages is also problematic. Huberman's professional life cycle literature review (1989) claims that, while there are some reasonably strong trends that recur across stage theory studies, the empirical literature identifying stages and phases in teaching is uneven and inconclusive. Career development is ... a process, not a series of events. For some, this process may be linear, but for others there will be plateaus, regressions, deadİends, spurts, discontinuities. So the identification of phases and sequences must be handled gingerly, as an analytic heuristic, as a descriptive rather than a normative construct. (Huberman, 1989:32) Bullough (1989) notes similarly that `human development defies easy categorisation. It is seldom smooth, never conflict free, and frequently characterised by backsliding' (Bullough, 1989:17). The broad picture of teacher career development and human development, described by Huberman and Bullough respectively, is just as applicable to beginning teacher development. Novices obviously do not all have identical enculturation experiences. Nor do they all proceed through developmental stages with robotİlike precision. `Stage theories' provide one explanation for how neophytes develop but uncertainty exists as to how well the neatly packaged `stage models' reflect actual teaching experiences; the career paths of individuals are neither invariant nor universal. In summary, both socialisation and stage theory perspectives have limitations. While socialisation perspectives overemphasise the uniformity of a culture of teaching and the passivity of the novice teacher in the enculturation process, models of stage development do not address the matter of how teachers progress from one stage to another, nor why they develop a variety of forms of culture. THE STUDY Method The two teachers featured in the present paper have been selected on the basis that they epitomise the varied means by which beginning teachers cope with the demands of their professional roles and the subtle interplay of contextual and personal factors. During 1993, data were gathered using participant observation, verbalised thinking and inİdepth interviews. These were analysed by isolating both common and different experiences of the participants and attempting to account for them in terms of developmental `stage' theories and the personal and situational factors which influenced the participants' development. Results and Discussion Obviously, the present paper does not allow for a detailed exploration of the experiences of the two teachers. What follows represents a highly selective account of the experiences of two beginning teachers but, at the same time, a genuine attempt has been made to allow their authentic voices to speak out and to highlight those experiences viewed as important by the participants themselves. In other words, an attempt has been made to reveal the phenomenological worlds of the participants. Laura Laura's passion for music began at age five, with Grandma's gift of a piano. Laura and her parents entered into an agreement regarding lessons and thus began a way of life described by Laura as one `that I couldn't possibly do without'. There were several teaching connections in her family but Laura discounted these as influences in her decision to be a teacher. Of much greater significance, she claimed, was the impact of her music teachers when she was a young student. Among her strongest motives to teach `was a childİlike desire to be like these women who I had as my mentors'. Some role models from her own schooling influenced Laura's teaching. Her favourite teachers treated her `like an adult, and with respect'. They were also the teachers who were youthful (in spirit), open and approachable, and interesting. Laura acknowledged the `huge influence' of three of her secondary school teachers on her own teaching, noting how she reflected at times on how they might respond to particular situations. Laura's achievements as a secondary school student helped promote her personal development. For all five years she was a member of the debating team, a member of the student council and a participant in the school musical. As well as being school captain, she was house captain, a member of the magazine committee, and a Lions' Youth of the Year. Her heavy extraİcurricular involvement foreshadowed, in some ways, her own extraİmural involvement as a beginning secondary school teacher. Some of the effects were, however, quite different in that the pressure of so many extra tasks proved inimical to her development as a teacher. Laura prepared for teaching by completing a fourİyear Bachelor of Music course. She was ambivalent about its usefulness, feeling well prepared in terms of content but was inadequately prepared for the pressures of firstİyear teaching. As the year progressed, for example, Laura became increasingly frustrated at her lack of knowledge of budgeting and purchasing procedures and of the extent of the general paperwork requirements for teachers. She described her practicum experiences in a similar vein. `I think prac. was a bit unrealistic because I never saw what really went on at the desk level at high school.' In voicing this concern, Laura was echoing the sentiments of Clark who claimed that `undoubtedly, [preİservice] students' conceptions of teaching are incomplete, for they typically see and hear only the performance side of teaching' (cited in Weinstein, 1989:53). Laura was particularly referring to the plethora of nonİteaching tasks required of teachers, compared with her own limited nonİteaching tasks as a preİservice teacher. Laura began teaching at the start of 1993. She was appointed to a secondary school in a country area of the Education Department's Metropolitan West Region. Her university curriculum areas were music and chemistry. She was allocated all of the music taught in the school, with the subject being restricted to the junior school. She was also assigned a junior science class. Laura's staffroom was a long, narrow, overcrowded room which provided very little privacy for its occupants. It was, however, close to the music room, where most of Laura's lessons took place. The room had access to another classroom, thereby, in the physical sense at least, facilitating coİoperative teaching. Laura did teach coİoperatively on a number of occasions during the year. She also found observation visits by members of administration generally helpful. Although particular circumstances resulted in her feeling inadequate and embarrassed on occasions, Laura claimed that her classroom contacts with colleagues were `very helpful' and potentially valuable for `all beginning teachers'. Her experiences indicate that problems of isolation can be overcome in varying degrees by the situational factors of building design and timetabling arrangements. Obviously, personal factors (such as Laura's perceptions of personal inadequacy) would also have significance. Laura was heavily involved in extraİcurricular activities from the outset, and especially so after the midİyear vacation when preparation for the school musical had gained full momentum. Her timeİconsuming involvement with the musical coloured her perceptions of staff, students and administration to some extent. Staff and students, for example, were not as supportive as she hoped in the early stages of production. Administration was not always sensitive to the way her extraİcurricular workİload was impacting on her primary teaching duties. `I don't think people are aware of the amount of time it takes to, say, whip up a National Anthem for the student council investiture.' In common with many beginning teachers (e.g. see Smith et al., 1991), Laura found the demands of teaching heavy and intrusive. In February, for example, Laura commented that she would arrive home from school exhausted, then spend time each evening preparing for the next day. She explained that time at school was hectic. I feel like when I am at school, I don't sit down. I'm lucky if I have lunches and morning teas. I get to school an hour before school starts. I just feel like the only time I have a social life is on Saturdays because I spend Sunday at the school as well. Yes, it's a pretty heavy sort of situation at the moment. As mentioned above, Laura believed that the inequitable distribution of extraİcurricular and coİcurricular activities was adversely affecting her teaching. She commented that, at times when she should be using her spare periods for correction and preparation, `I am doing things like running around chasing up instruments and students and working our parts with the musical and rewriting or making backing tapes'. The pressure was obviously and understandably taking its toll. At the end of March, Laura lamented that: My lunch times are all taken up and so are my morning teas, so I feel like ... for a start, I don't eat when I'm at school because I don't have time, so by the end of the day, I am so worn out that I really can't be teaching effectively. I feel that, at times when I have had too much to do, I don't teach well because I am not as well prepared as I should be. The pressure experienced by Laura in her first year did not stem only from her work context. By May, Laura found herself under considerable pressure by virtue of her engagement to be married. The relationship developed quickly and, as a result, Laura's private life had `become a little bit more hectic and out of control than it had been ... '. Priorities also changed. [My hectic private life] is affecting my work as I have sort of implied through this whole interview, in that I have been more tired and distracted and not really concentrating as much on putting all the time that I used to into preparation. Overall, Laura acknowledged that the quality of her teaching had diminished. because this term, I am preoccupied. I am experimenting this term. I am gaining the confidence to experiment but I am only doing that because I am not prepared. Laura's stress was exacerbated by ill health during most of the first half of the year, during which time she suffered glandular fever. Not until August did she believe that the glandular fever had finally disappeared. I think my glandular fever's finally gone, which is really positive. My blood pressure's up at the moment, but that's all right. That's just stress related. But I'm feeling okay. While Laura was critical of the role of the school administration in making extreme demands on her time, she acknowledged that when she made her plight known, they did relieve her of some duties. Nevertheless, she remained critical of what she perceived as an inequitable allocation of extraİcurricular duties and insufficient support in helping teachers overcome the lack of motivation that she perceived characterised many of the students. Laura's use of imagery shed light on her development as a teacher. She found herself, at the start of the year, in the role of police officer, `because I was in the class really solving discipline problems, and I felt a bit like a correctional officer ...'. By the end of March. Laura's image of self as teacher had changed. Feeling quite comfortable in her role as classroom manager, she now framed her image of self as teacher in more human terms. She wanted to have a wellİmanaged classroom, `but without having to upset anybody, without being too much of a disciplinarian'. She now saw her role in counselling and pedagogic terms. I want to be someone that the kids know they can approach if they have got problems, either in school or out of school, like with their work or with their family or friends ... I would like to be someone that the kids see as enjoying and learning my subject and for them to want to learn the subject too. By the end of August and feeling immense pressure, Laura's image had undergone a metamorphosis to the extent that she totally discounted the human element of her role as teacher. I feel like a secretary now, actually, and an administrator. At the moment, I feel like everything important about my job that relates to the way the administration sees me functioning is to do with paper and filling in surveys or writing notes and sending letters off left, right and centre, and I feel if I don't do that efficiently and adequately, then my role as a teacher may not look as effective. In December, there were still overtones of `teacher as secretary' in her image of self as teacher. But, with many pressures removed, there was a perceivable shift in her imagery back towards her teaching function. With positive feelings about the musical still current, her first year teacher appraisal satisfactorily completed, student examinations concluded, and feeling well accepted as a member of the community in which she was establishing her home, Laura saw herself as being in partnership with her students, `more as an equal, more as a friend, as a real person'. Her image of self as teacher had regained its human element. Summation The processes by which Laura was enculturated into teaching are but dimly illuminated by stage theory. Laura in fact entered teaching with a relatively high degree of competence, being able to draw upon her five years of experience as a music tutor. As Laura's use of imagery indicates, her development during her initial year of teaching can be scarcely be described as linear İ personal factors, in particular her engagement and her illness, were to result in periods where Laura believed herself to be relapsing into less adaptive, `survival' modes of teaching. Contextual factors such as her very heavy extraİmural load also impacted upon Laura's enculturation, exacerbating her tendency to regress into `survival' strategies at times when she found such demands particularly onerous. Yet at other times, Laura was helped to move forward by coİoperative teaching and the influence of some of her colleagues. Laura's beginning teaching experiences also attest to the crucial role of biography in shaping teacher behaviour (Lortie, 1973:487). Laura's teaching schemata, her formulation of problems and her strategies for coping with problems continued to be strongly influenced by the experiences which she had undergone as a school student and the approaches of those former teachers whom she most admired and sought to emulate. Laura's reference to how she often thought about how such teachers would have reacted to the specific situations which confronted her is testament to the enduring effect of anticipatory socialisation (Zeichner, 1986:31). At least for Laura, there was comparatively little acknowledgement of the incorporation of propositional knowledge derived from her preİservice teacher education course into her teaching schemata. Louise Like Laura, Louise wanted to be a teacher from an early age. Her acknowledgement of that ambition was unambiguous and her intentions singleİminded from early in her childhood. As in the case of Laura, the influence of her own teachers seemed paramount, especially given that there was no history of teaching in Louise's family. I've wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember, probably because I admired my own teachers a lot. I had a lot of respect for them and I suppose in a way I put them on a pedestal as I thought they weren't human ... Louise was influenced positively both by her teachers' pedagogic competence and by their personal qualities. I was very lucky to have always had very İ or what I felt İ very good teachers, in that they were very good at getting across the content, but they were a nice type of people too. I think that might have been a huge factor in influencing me towards becoming a teacher. Not surprisingly, Louise found both of these qualities in her `favourite' teacher. My favourite teacher was the type who could get through all the content that she wanted, but still make it interesting and enjoyable. She was very caring, too. The `caring' that Louise referred to extended to matters beyond the schoolground. It was these traits that Louise saw in this teacher, and in others, that she wanted to incorporate into her own teaching. She wanted to help her students with `not only learning about the specific subject, but also ... just how to live everyday life'. Like Laura, she found herself reflecting on how a teacher she admired might react in a given situation. Louise attended a private coeducation primary school and a private girls' secondary school. She was actively involved in many facets of secondary school life, undertaking responsibilities including prefect, houseİcaptain, and leader of the school's sports committee. Louise represented her school in many cultural and sporting activities, and she enjoyed the warm relationships she formed with peers and teachers. Her happy experiences as a school student stimulated her desire to provide a similarly positive environment for her own students. In this respect, her attitude was similar to that of Laura. Their attitudes thus strongly endorse the findings of Lortie (1973, 1975) with respect to the formative influence of teachers. Louise also noted that she had been influenced positively by the quality of some of her university teachers and her coİoperating teachers during her practicum which had been undertaken at a state high school, larger than, but in many ways similar to, her firstİyear appointment. It was a stimulating experience. I loved prac. I got a lot out of it and it didn't turn me off teaching at all. In fact, probably because I got such a good school, it led me towards being a teacher even more. Louise began teaching at the same school as Laura. Her university courses prepared her for teaching English and history, but although she was allocated classes in those two areas, she was also assigned classes in speech and drama and in geography. Unlike Laura, her extraİcurricular and coİcurricular involvement was not particularly heavy, being largely restricted most of the year to participation in meetings such as advisory council, coİordinator meetings and general staff meetings. These activities, however, when combined with a sports supervision afternoon and Louise's conscientious approach to planning and marking, gave her a heavy work schedule. Louise agreed, to a large extent, with Laura's assessment of the student population. Like Laura, she described them as being not particularly academic, and agreed that they were `nice kids'. She discovered how `nice' they were only after attending seminars for beginning teachers, and finding out there about behaviour problems confronting many of her peers in other schools. She spoke positively about her classes, noting frequently, however, that she faced management difficulties with one of them. She differed with Laura in her assessment of the students in only one respect, albeit an important one. While Laura thought that many of the students were relatively unmotivated, Louise described them as `pretty well motivated'. Some of them who I would regard as low achievers, they just don't want to do well. They want to sit there and bludge for the whole lesson. It's not very many. Despite her emphasis on the trial and error nature of her first year of teaching, Louise's teaching schemata were reasonably well defined for a beginning teacher. She conceptualised teaching in terms of facilitating student learning, not only in the narrow sense of gaining understanding of particular subjects, but also as a means of fostering interpersonal relationships that would help students lead happier, more productive lives. Louise also brought a socially critical perspective to her teaching from her university studies, and attempted to `get inside the students' minds' (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1989:39) by `bringing up things that relate to them' such as TV programs, newspaper articles and `music that they're interested in'. Her thinking about her teacher role was, however, relatively pragmatic at the start of the year. Given the time pressures she faced, this was hardly surprising. Her thoughts centred mainly on practical matters such as the need to be well planned and prepared, and on how to manage her classes. While she believed her teaching competence improved through the year, the focus of Louise's thinking about teaching remained relatively stable. In August, for example, she said: You think about how the day's going to go and you think about what you've got planned for that day, and if it all runs smoothly. So it's all much the same. Probably just more aware of it now İ more aware of what's going to happen ... you've got a fair idea of how you're going to handle it. Louise seemed to approach her first year of teaching as though it were a period of consolidation of her preİservice education experiences and a time for building a platform for quality teaching in her second year. In essence she appeared to view her beginning teaching experience in the nature of a `dress rehearsal'. This `dress rehearsal' view of the first year of teaching was, for example, evident in Louise's approach to teaching her subjects. As noted earlier, she approached taught in four subject areas, two of them outside her university teaching areas. She did not, however, find the task of teaching outside her curriculum areas especially daunting because she viewed it as a valuable experience which would stand her in good stead for her future teaching. Thus at the end of March, she commented, in connection with teaching geography, `... I am learning more as I go along myself'. On teaching speech and drama, she said, at the same time, `I am sort of feeling my way with that, too'. In December, she reflected: I've enjoyed the subjects that I've taught, even though I wasn't qualified to teach speech and drama [and geography] as such. I've learned a lot from it, and I can build on that for next year. She drew heavily from the work programs that she found at the school (feeling `very stressed out' till the speech and drama work program `popped up somewhere') in speech and drama, history and geography. There is no suggestion that Louise merely copied from the work of her predecessors; to the contrary, she worked hard at planning her own content and activities and resources. The framework of her teaching, however, was drawn to a large extent from the planning of others, a strategy entirely compatible with her notion that first year was a foundation year which would pave the way for a more innovative approach in following years. In similar vein, Louise claimed, in August, that her main priority in teaching was `getting the content across' to the students. Sometimes, because of time constraints (in history, for example), this involved a `chalk and talk' approach, but she had aspirations for next year of teaching `more creatively'. In November, Louise was asked if she agreed with the summation that her strategy this year was, `You find your feet, you gain confidence this year, and then you use that as a foundation for a more adventurous approach next year'. Her response was unambiguous: Definitely. Yes, once I've taught it once, I've got the basics there and I can then go ahead and organise myself more to be able to use a more creative approach. Her resolution for 1994, expressed in December 1993, echoed this sentiment. Her aim was `to build upon what I've taught this year and to make it even better for next year'. Louise's approach to identifying and coping with problems was similarly futureİoriented. She considered it natural, for example, to have to confront problems as a novice. She expected to lack some confidence, for instance, regarding her content knowledge (`... that's only natural, I suppose, being a first year'), but she had clearly defined goals for the future: `I know after first year I will probably be able to talk about it [history] off the top of my head, but until then, I won't be satisfied'. Similarly, as mentioned earlier, she was also quite phlegmatic about her heavy workload and the stressful nature of beginning teaching: I see it all being part of a teacher's job, so in the long run, it is only going to be advantageous to me ... it's all part of developing me as a teacher. There were thus some elements of a `survival' mode in Louise's first year experience, but without the trauma that accompanied this phase in Laura's career. Although Louise found the workload heavier than she had expected, there was nothing approaching the `reality shock' described by Veenman (1984). It was as if she were learning, practising and then `perfecting' a set of skills for use in a new environment: her secondİyearİofİteaching classrooms. Her development should most properly be described in these terms. As was the case with Laura, the use of imagery shed a little light on Louise's beginning teacher development. In March, she saw herself as the students' friend, but one entitled to their respect as the teacher who sought their obedience and coİoperation. In August, Louise still looked to relationships with students for a personal image of teaching and found it in `nurturer'. The nurturing element of her teaching had, in fact, strengthened through the year as she got to know her students better. Louise's desire to nurture her students was tested in October when her purse was stolen from her staffroom by a student whom Louise had been helping. This event was a critical incident in Louise's development because it had a profound impact on her trustfulness of people. That her nurturing image in general continued to strengthen in spite of this incident is surprising, but Louise was, nevertheless, more circumspect about the way she trusted others. In December, Louise said that the image `teacher as nurturer' still suited her best. `The teacher,' she added, `has a duty like a parent away from home'. Thus Louise embraced a nurturing image throughout the year; in development terms, her embrace grew stronger, the theft incident notwithstanding, as the year progressed. Summation As in the case of Laura, the process whereby Louise was enculturated into the teaching profession needs to be considered in relation to both biographical and situational factors. Louise's decision to be a teacher was made early in her life, and she began teaching highly motivated as a result of positive personal experiences. Favourable experiences as a school student, in university classes and during the practicum increased her desire to teach and played a significant part in the development of her teaching schemata. Achieving her childhood ambition to become a teacher, and modelling her `favourite' teachers, Louise wanted to help her students learn in a properly disciplined environment, and to have a caring attitude towards them. On taking up her first teaching appointment, Louise worked very conscientiously towards achieving these goals. Her work schedule was heavy, partly because she was assigned classes in four different areas, two of which were outside her areas of expertise. Relatively undaunted by this difficult situation, Louise actually turned it to her advantage. Highly motivated from an early age to teach and, indeed, to `nurture' her students, she saw this and other firstİyear teaching experiences as opportunities to build a platform for more creative, caring and generally more competent teaching in the following year. GENERAL DISCUSSION The enculturation of Laura and Louise demonstrates the limitations both of stage theory and teacher socialisation perspectives as explanatory frameworks. In the case of Laura, stage theory does not adequately account for the nonİlinear character of her enculturation with its cyclical episodes of regression to less adaptive survival strategies under the weight of personal and situational factors. Furthermore, Laura's attempts to experiment in her teaching did not develop out of a greater selfİconfidence stemming from the acquisition of greater teaching proficiency İ as would be predicted by stage theory İ but tended to result from circumstances in which she believed her lesson preparation had been inadequate. The linear progression through distinct stages of development articulated by most stage theorists was perhaps more evidenced in the enculturation of Louise, but her initial and enduring concern with her impact upon students rather than herself does not sit easily with stage theory. Louise, in fact retained her image of teaching as nurturing and her socially critical view of teaching even in the midst of her pragmatism. It seems reasonable to propose that Louise did exhibit `survival' characteristics. These, however, were not accompanied by the trauma that characterised the way Laura was enculturated into teaching during her first year. Rather, survival traits were apparent in a relatively benign form in the way that Louise consciously attempted to `find her feet' before embarking on a more innovative, experimental approach to teaching in her second year. Her measured strategy to learn from her first year experiences suggests she aspired to achieve the characteristics of a `mastery' stage (Fuller & Bown, 1975) or an `advanced beginner' stage (Berliner, 1986) in the following year. Her concept of her first year of teaching as constituting a dress rehearsal for subsequent years, in which she would be able to give concrete expression to her image of teacher as nurturer, can be viewed as a coping mechanism to meet the very considerable challenges which she faced in her initial year of teaching İ challenges exacerbated by having to teach subjects for which she was inadequately prepared. Teacher socialisation perspectives do help illuminate the enculturation of Laura and Louise but, as in the case of stage theory, their utility is limited. While Laura was significantly influenced by both contextual and personal factors such as her heavy extraİmural load, her interactions with colleagues and her coİoperative teaching and especially by particular events such as her engagement and her illness, Louise's development appeared less influenced by factors of this type. However, situational factors and particular events were certainly not without some impact upon Louise's enculturation. For example, her meeting with other beginning teachers affected her attitude towards her own students and her definition of problems, and the theft of her purse made her far more cautious in her dealings with students. The enculturation of both Laura and Louise was strongly influenced by anticipatory socialisation stemming from their own school days, as evidenced by their attempts to visualise how former, admired teachers would have attempted to solve specific problems which faced them. On the other hand, whereas Louise acknowledged that values and propositional and procedural knowledge derived from her preİservice education İ such as her socially critical perspective İ were incorporated into her teaching schemata, Laura placed far less value on these experiences and they received little explicit recognition in her teaching schemata and approach to problem solving. This study has argued that neither stage theory nor socialisation perspectives can, of themselves, adequately account for the complex processes involved in beginning teacher enculturation. The explanatory value of each will vary according to a range of factors, among which the phenomenological world of the individual is crucial in determining how events will be interpreted and the extent to which they will be incorporated into teaching schemata. Any adequate description of beginning teacher enculturation must recognise the subtle interplay of biographical and contextual factors. REFERENCES Berliner, D.C. 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