Choosing To Stay, Choosing To Leave: New York City Teaching Fellows after Two Years

Over the last three decades, the educational research community has come to see that the process of becoming a teacher is situated autobiographically in the context of peoples ’ lives (Costigan & Crocco, 2004; Goodson & Hargreaves, 1996; Hubermann, 1993; Levin, 2003). The use of narrative and ethnographic methodol-ogy has become central to understanding how new teachers come to understand themselves as teachers, become socialized into the profession, and come to understand the teaching craft (Zeichner, Tabachnik, & Densmore, 1987). Increas-ingly, attention has been paid to the narratives teach-ers create in their early years, in order to better understand the patterns of thinking by which they begin to develop as teachers (Clark, 2001; Costigan, 2004; Rust, 1999). Put simply, who teachers are, what they think, how they feel, the patterns of how they develop (Hollingsworth, 1989), as well as their shifting centers of foci and attention (Rust & Orland, 2001), matter a great deal in understanding how teachers come to identify with, and become social-ized into, teaching. Arthur T. Costigan is a professor in th