Beginning to teach: explorations of context through lived experience

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)This thesis is an exploration of the contexts of teaching of four beginning teachers and of the ways of knowing, derived through lived experience, that enabled their interactions within these contexts during the first two years of their careers in New South Wales primary schools. Within this thesis there is a particular focus on the beginning teachers' interactions with parents as one of the multiple dimensions of context. Educational reform has advocated the participation of parents and the community in the school. Accordingly, recently devised competency frameworks of teaching have included expectations that the graduate will have developed an ability to work with parents and, as a beginning teacher, be able to develop close partnerships between home and school. These expectations of policy have become an element of the structural context of teaching, but the practice of the beginning teachers us also shaped by elements of the sociocultural and historical contexts of the school and class and by the biographical contexts of the teacher, the learners and their parents. The development of the knowledge and skills that support participation is limited within initial teacher education programs. The expectations found within a framework of teaching competencies provides a statement of the theory of teaching, representing a technical knowledge base for the profession. Its application in context becomes the practical knowledge base. Here, communicative and critical knowledge based on lived experience come to supplement the technical foundations in shaping the practical work of a teacher in a particular context. Lived experience therefore provides the vehicle for the construction of ways of knowing that inform the practical work, language and power of each beginning teacher