This is a report of the first year of a longitudinal study to investigate changes in preservice teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about reading instruction before, during, and after a fifth-year teacher education program. In particular, changes in global preprogram beliefs about education, teaching, and learning were traced as preservice teachers acquired specific knowledge of how to manage, assess, and instructionally facilitate students’ learning through text. Researchers interviewed and observed 14 elementary and secondary preservice teachers as they entered the teacher education program, attended reading classes at the university, then taught reading in school classrooms. These qualitative data were analyzed to determine (a) the patterns of intellectual change from novice preservice teacher to beginning classroom teacher; (b) the personal, program, and contextual influences or constraints on that change; (c) the role of the cooperating teacher and university supervisor in supporting intellectual change; and (d) the nature of prior beliefs on identity maintenance while learning. Findings include the importance of understanding preservice teachers’ prior beliefs to inform supervision and university course design, the value of cognitive dissonance in practice teaching contexts, the need to routinize classroom management knowledge before attending to subject-specific pedagogy, and the importance of the academic task as part of the teaching knowledge base.

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As part of a longitudinal research project on learning to teach literacy and as a personal quest to make her work as a teacher educator more supportive, this researcher arranged an ongoing conversation for members of three cohorts of preservice and beginning elementary teachers. The conversation was prompted by an interest in beginning teachers’ critical responses to the personal support for learning to teach that they receive from their teacher education programs. From the social, collaborative, and nonevaluative conversations, personally and contextually relevant issues in learning to teach emerged, as did the processes of identifying and understanding them. The result was not only a clarification of important relational and political issues that seem prerequisite to issues of academic learning, but also the emergence of a feminist consciousness —in both teachers and researcher. The method of studying the group’s learning, then, became an example of feminist praxis: a willingness to risk and examine personal experiences as women and to be changed by the research process itself. The value of this conversational approach for learning to teach in urban settings becomes clear in the narrative.

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