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The intensification process associated with the first year of teaching has a significant impact on beginning teachers' personal and professional lives. This paper uses a narrative approach to investigate the electronic conversations of 16 beginning teachers on a self-initiated group email site. The participants' electronic exchanges demonstrated their qualities of agency, efficacy and resilience (AER), and an increased sense of self-determination as they journeyed through the five phases typical of first year teacher experience. Findings suggest that the provision of similar peer-based support mechanisms would benefit other beginning teachers, perhaps working to counteract current high attrition rates from the profession.

Pre-service teacher education programs play an important role in the development of beginning teacher' self-efficacy and identity. Research suggests that this development is influenced by the "apprenticeship of learning". However, there remains limited research about the self-efficacy beliefs and identity construction of beginning pre-service teachers entering teacher training, and the impact of the education programs on the development of these attributes. This paper reports on the first phase of a longitudinal study that investigates beginning pre-service teachers' views of what it is to be a teacher. In 2010, the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001) was administered twice (start and end of the year) to beginning pre-service teachers enrolled in three programs: the Graduate Diploma of Early Childhood Education; the Graduate Diploma of Education--Primary; and the Graduate Diploma of Education--Secondary. Identity data in the form of text and visual representations of the teachers were also collected. This paper focuses on the results from the self-efficacy scale, highlighting the similarities and more notable contrasts in individual perceived ratings of teacher self-efficacy. Implications for further research are shared. (Contains 4 tables.)

Recent education policy places a heavy emphasis on parents in relation to students' success at school. This paper explores how parents and teachers account for school success. Using membership categorisation analysis, it interrogates data collected in different interview situations across sites over a period of 20 years. The analysis shows how parents and teachers use talk as moral work to conversationally constitute particular agreed versions of the category "parent." This category is interactively assembled through the use of category-bound attributes that construct deficit discourses of parents that explain student achievement. The analysis demonstrates that parents are complicit with teachers in producing versions of being a good parent wherein they are held responsible for their children's school success and that minimises the responsibility of the school. These findings raise questions both about who is responsible for schooling and about current contradictory policy emphases on parent and teacher responsibility for school success.

The media regularly present negative news articles about teachers and teaching. This paper focuses particularly on one such news article. Using reflective analytic practices, first we zoom in to conduct a detailed analysis of the text. We find that complex and contradictory moral categories of teachers are assembled within and through the text. We then zoom out to consider the potentially detrimental effects of such public discourses on teachers and the teaching profession. We make visible the dominant discourses in this text, illuminating some of the societal issues and practices that are textually constituted within this and other news articles about teachers. We provide evidence of a public discourse that might be contributing towards continuing concerns and negative public opinion regarding teacher quality and schooling standards. We argue that such news articles may well work to influence public opinion regarding declining teacher quality and standards, and views of public schools as being in crisis, creating moral panic. (Contains 1 note.)

Analyzes examples of parent-teacher talk and printed materials sent to parents of students attending various secondary schools in and around a large city. The article focuses on extracts in which responsibility for student surveillance is negotiated. Findings indicate that parents, teachers, and students regulate themselves and each other through recurring conversational and textual practices. (12 references) (Author/CK)

Recent education policy places a heavy emphasis on parents in relation to students' success at school. This paper explores how parents and teachers account for school success. Using membership categorisation analysis, it interrogates data collected in different interview situations across sites over a period of 20 years. The analysis shows how parents and teachers use talk as moral work to conversationally constitute particular agreed versions of the category ‘parent’. This category is interactively assembled through the use of category-bound attributes that construct deficit discourses of parents that explain student achievement. The analysis demonstrates that parents are complicit with teachers in producing versions of being a good parent wherein they are held responsible for their children's school success and that minimises the responsibility of the school. These findings raise questions both about who is responsible for schooling and about current contradictory policy emphases on parent and teacher responsibility for school success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As part of the school practicum experience, supervising and pre-service teachers have regular professional conversations. Supervising teachers are expected to model, assess and evaluate their pre-service teachers' classroom skills, and a key component of this is feedback about pre-service teachers' teaching techniques. This paper uses conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to unpack the initial three turns of such feedback to show how they have procedural consequence for the speakers' professional relationships and for the talk that follows. Analysis of seven audio-recordings reveals some of the conversational ways the participants constitute their institutional roles and relationships within a particular moral relational order: the speakers talking as supervising, or pre-service teachers with and for each other about teaching practices. Pre-service teachers are seen for the most part to align with their supervising teachers' versions of events. These speakers collaboratively co-construct asymmetrical institutional relationships, interactively normalising their shared understandings of attributes associated with 'good' teachers and effective teaching. We suggest that the development of such asymmetric relationships and understandings may well inhibit pre-service teacher learning, limiting possibilities for extended understandings of alternative classroom practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practicum is a highly valued component of teacher education programmes, providing opportunities for preservice teachers to observe, learn and trial effective teaching in partnership with experienced mentor-teachers. To date, little research has investigated how school-based practicum relationships are interactively achieved, turn-by-turn, in situ. Employing a single case study, this paper analyses a conversation between a mentor teacher and a preservice teacher about high-stakes assessment of the teachermentee's practices. Methods derived from conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis reveal that the participants assemble a pleasant but asymmetrical mentoring relationship by means of a continuing three-part conversational structural arrangement in this particular educational site, talking-into-being mutually acceptable versions of teachers and of teacherly practices. However, opportunities for mutually mediated learning and relational knowing were lost. These findings suggest the need to examine additional examples of similar school-based mentoring conversations about evaluation to see whether the analytic phenomena revealed here are typical or atypical of such institutional interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]