Journeys to teaching: Autonomy shifts in pre-service teachers' narratives of becoming a teacher

Abstract

Abstract Internationally and in South Africa, there have been calls for the admission to teacher education programmes to be based on initial commitment to teaching. They claim a high attrition rate of early career teachers because they chose to do a teaching qualification by default rather than by choice. These calls, which presume that the future commitment of pre-service teachers to teaching can be predicted at the outset, lack empirical support. This study adopts a sociological approach to examining pre-service teachers' journeys into teaching and through teacher education programmes. It uses the Autonomy dimension of Legitimation Code Theory to compare the knowledge/s that pre-service teachers seek and the benefits they hope to derive from that knowledge at the start and middle of their teacher preparation programmes. The study involves narratives from 77 pre-service teachers completing a four-year Bachelor of Education Degree and an online survey with 32 of these participants. Narrative data is drawn from a large-scale South African research project associated with the Teacher Choices in Action module. I use autonomy pathways from Legitimation Code Theory to analyse how pre-service teachers' positions on the autonomy plane change about the knowledge they seek and the benefits they hope to derive during their teacher preparation. The findings of this study show that, initially, 52% of participants entered initial teacher education reluctantly or with reservations, while 48% were interested in teaching from the outset; however, during the B.Ed. Degree, these reservations diminished, and 81% of the participants actively sought knowledge for teaching and regarded benefits derived from participating in teaching. Only 1% of participants retained their initial reservations. Nearly all participants' positions on the autonomy plane changed over time, highlighting the importance of understanding the mechanisms behind these shifts to comprehend why students persist with their studies and commit to teaching regardless of their initial motivations. The shifts observed were prompted by personal experiences of tutoring others (41%), students’ interaction with teachers (28%), their acquisition of new theoretical insights into teaching and their subject specialisation (17%), and school-based teaching experiences (5%). The study concludes that the initial motivations of pre-service teachers are not reliable indicators of their long-term commitment to the teaching profession and should not be used as criteria for admission to teacher education programmes. Keywords: Legitimation Code Theory, autonomy pathways, motivations, initial teacher education, pre-service teacher, journeys.