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This qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews examines the metaphors new teachers use to describe their professional identities and compares metaphors chosen immediately following graduation with those suggested part way through their first year of teaching. Findings indicate that new teachers make a shift from seeing themselves as ready for the challenge, to adopting a survival mode. The metaphors suggest that new teachers struggle to develop a professional identity during their first year, and that this development process is gradual, complex and often problematic. Implications for teacher education indicate that greater emphasis needs to be placed on exploring professional identity in pre-service programmes.

As teachers enter the school communities of their initial practice, they experience identity shifts that reflect their learning. Throughout teacher education they have constructed an identity informed by their previous school experiences, the ideas and approaches promoted by their teacher education programs, and an ideal of the teachers they hope to become. The complex set of influences at the boundary between their lives as students and their lives as professionals causes them to confront their identities in new and sometimes disruptive ways (Flores & Day, 2006). New teaching situations introduce them to the thinking of experienced teachers, and to the needs of their first groups of learners, challenging the notions they have so far developed about who they are as teachers (Smagorinsky, Cook, Moore, Jackson, & Fry, 2004). This paper reports on interviews with 35 new teachers as they graduate from teacher education programs and enter the profession, and details their learning about agency and role in community resulting in identity changes within this boundary space. (Contains 1 table.)

The study reported here, one part of a larger study on doctoral education, describes a pilot study that used Activity Theory to shape a methodological tool for better understanding the tensions inherent in the doctoral experience. As doctoral students may function within a range of activity systems, we designed data collection protocols based on Activity Theory to examine their experience. This paper describes these protocols, the results of a piloting of these protocols, and discusses the strengths and limitations of using Activity Theory in this way. (Contains 1 note and 2 figures.)

Reflection has become an accepted component of teacher education programs. Yet the concept has been much criticized, in particular its role in improving professional practice. This paper provides an overview of persistent and emerging criticisms of reflection, as well as a discussion of approaches taken to reflection in the literature since 2005. Two issues, context and identity, are revealed as predominant in the recent discussions of reflection. Recommendations stemming from the literature for better understanding reflection and for enhancing its role in teacher education are outlined, and a commentary on the possible impacts of adopting these recommendations in teacher education is included. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]