Identity formation in undergraduate teacher preparation programs is often challenging for teacher candidates. Future teachers sometimes find themselves in tension-filled situations where university preparation program practices contradict expectations of elementary school internships or their beliefs about teaching children. Often, teacher candidates are relegated to two choices: conform to the internship context, survive, or resist and risk potential denial to the system towards which they feel dissonance . This chapter shows how two teacher candidates in a two-year full-time teacher residency preparation program felt dissonance towards their internship setting mentor teachers and how they leveraged the structure of their university program to advance their teaching status in those contexts. Through scapegoating the literacy content coach and coaching cycle, Megan and Natalie impacted children's learning experiences and their teacher identities.
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In recent years, there has been a steady decline in the number of individuals who choose teaching as a career. The U.S. Department of Education National Center on Education Statistics (NCES) show that, between 2010 and 2015, the number of persons enrolled in state accredited or alternative teacher preparation programs declined by 35 percent. In 2022, NCES reported that 69 percent of K–12 public schools cited that their primary challenge for filling 2022–2023 school year teaching vacancies was too few candidates applying for open positions. There are two issues concerning teacher vacancies; too few entering the field, and teacher attrition for those that choose a profession in education (Garcia & Weiss, 2019). High school graduates are choosing careers that yield higher salaries (ACT, 2021; Sawchuk, 2014) and greater long-term job security (National School Boards Association (NSBA), 2016), over teaching. Others associate the decline in the desire to avoid high-stakes teacher evaluations and test accountability measures imposed on the current teaching force (Garcia & Weiss, 2019; Goldhaber & Walch, 2014).
For those entering the progression, many first-year teachers are often hired in urban schools that suffer from economic, social, and/or cultural vulnerability and where there are high teacher and student turnover rates (Redding & Henry, 2019; Fantilli & McDougall, 2009; NSBA, 2016). These newly hired teachers enter positions where they are expected to act, analyze, and instruct students like veteran teachers, even though their only prior pedagogical experiences are from internship settings (Fantilli & McDougall, 2009; Garcia & Weiss, 2019). In that internship context, supervisors, mentor teachers, and university methods instructors become mediators between teacher candidates and the real world of education. Ultimately, teacher candidates reside in a purgatorial space and end up being responsible for very little of the educational practices associated with the practicum classroom (Darling-Hammond, 2006). This results in inexperienced teachers entering the profession without the expertise needed to handle interaction and conflict with parents and students, administration and colleagues, or the content and pedagogical knowledge to provide quality instruction (Fantilli & McDougall, 2009; Hong, 2010; Ingersoll et al., 2022; Marable & Raimondi, 2007; Nugent & Faucette, 2013). For this chapter. Wholistic teacher unpreparedness leads to a conversation about teacher identity and the teacher candidates discussed in this chapter advocated for their own identity construction through scapegoating.