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Trained for isolation: The impact ofdepartmental cultures on studentteachers' views and practices ofcollaborationJorge A´vila de Lima aa Universidade dos Ac¸ores , PortugalPublished online: 03 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Jorge A´vila de Lima (2003) Trained for isolation: The impact of departmentalcultures on student teachers' views and practices of collaboration, Journal of Education for Teaching:International research and pedagogy, 29:3, 197-217

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Journal of Education for Teaching, Vol. 29, No. 3, November 2003

Trained for Isolation: the impact ofdepartmental cultures on studentteachers’ views and practices ofcollaborationJORGE AVILA DE LIMAUniversidade dos Acores, Portugal

ABSTRACT Today, isolated practice is regarded by most educators, administrators andpolicymakers as an inadequate way of performing teachers’ work. Most teachers andteacher educators embrace the current dominant discourse on the virtues of teachercollaboration, but these beliefs do not always materialize in the way programs of initialteacher education are organized and in the way student teachers experience their practicetraining. This paper examines this contradiction by analyzing the network structure andcontents of teachers’ professional interactions with student teachers and among them-selves in two secondary-school English departments. The data show that despite the formalarrangements and the discourses favoring collaborative practice, the student teacherswithin the two departments were socialized into professional cultures that framed theirviews of themselves and of teaching in essentially isolated ways. The paper discussesimplications of these results for studies of collaborative cultures in teaching and for thetraining of beginning teachers.

INTRODUCTION

The reality of professional isolation in teaching has been widely documented in extensiveresearch conducted over the past few decades. Many of the main factors that makeindividualized work patterns a prominent feature of life in schools have already beenidentified. Educationalists have also demonstrated the negative effects that teachers’isolated practice can have upon the quality of educational practice (McLaughlin, 1993), aswell as the shortcomings that characterize some of the so-called ‘collaborative’ activitiesthat take place in schools (Little, 1990; Huberman, 1993; Hargreaves, 1994).

Still, there is often lack of contextualization of the collaborative practices that arementioned in the literature. In particular, the contribution of teacher training models,programs and practices to the production and the reinforcement of isolated practice inschools is relatively under-studied. This paper focuses specifically on the way studentteachers may be trained to become isolated professionals, despite the dominant discourse

ISSN 0260-7476 print; ISSN 1360-0540 online/03/030197-21 2003 Journal of Education for TeachingDOI: 10.1080/0260747032000120105

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in the teaching profession on the advantages of collaboration, and the formal arrangementsthat exist in many schools for that effect. As we shall see, in practice training in teaching,the largely espoused theories of action with respect to joint work do not always correspondto the theories-in-use.

In the available literature on teacher collaboration, student teachers’ or beginning teachers’views on the collaborative dimensions of their immediate work contexts have been largelyoverlooked and these actors are rarely integrated as participants in research studies (for arecent notable exception, see Williams et al., 2001). However, their perspectives andexperiences can bring new light into why teacher isolation seems to resist so strongly thespirit and the initiatives of contemporary educational reform.

Student teaching is the typical culminating field experience in teacher preparation.Anxieties, uncertainty, doubt, tensions and frustrations are common hallmarks of thisintense and formative time (Lacey, 1977; Veenman, 1984). For many new teachers, thisperiod of great sensitivity has ‘a quality similar to an indelible imprint’ (Thies-Sprinthall,1986, p. 14) which may influence not only whether candidates remain in teaching, but thekind of teachers they become (Tickle, 1989; Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Villani, 2002).

In many ways, when entering the schools where they are about to begin their practicetraining, student teachers find themselves in the position of Schutz’s (1964/1971) stranger.As Schutz argued, for people who have been conducting their daily lives for some timewithin a group (as the more experienced teachers in a school), this group’s life representsa social world that is a field of routine action, rather than ‘an object of thinking’ (p. 27).By contrast, the stranger (in our case, the student teacher) places in question ‘nearlyeverything that seems to be unquestionable to the members of the approached group’.Consequently: ‘… the cultural pattern of the approached group is to the stranger not ashelter but a field of adventure, not a matter of course but a questionable topic ofinvestigation, not an instrument for disentangling problematic situations but a problematicsituation itself and one hard to master’ (p. 32).

He adds that the process of social adjustment that a newcomer undergoes when enteringa new group is ‘a continuous process of inquiry into the cultural pattern of the approachedgroup’ (p. 32). This paper builds on this idea to understand how student teachers come tomake sense of the dominant ways teachers interact professionally with one another in theschools where they begin their teaching practice.

Mutual support for new members within peer groups and a supportive context have beenhighlighted as characteristics of ‘quality’ induction programs in teaching (Feiman-Nemseret al., 1999; Fideler & Haselkorn, 1999; Turk, 1999). However, contrary to programs ofprofessional preparation in other professions, most preservice programs don’t makeeffective use of peer socialization processes in schools (Feiman-Nemser, 2001). Thecomplex practice of learning to teach entails technical as well as emotional aspects, andlearning to manage these occurs often in a context of profound professional and personalisolation (Tickle, 1991; Weiss & Weiss, 1999). For this reason, authors have stressed the

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importance of local actors such as mentors, ‘buddies’, tutors, supervisors, cooperatingteachers and the like in new teachers’ first professional experiences (Ballantyne et al.,1995; Waite, 1995; Serpell, 2000; Harrison, 2001). But many of these solutions oftenrepresent individualized approaches to student teachers’ work socialization, rather thancollaborative ones. This is why some have argued that the induction of new teachers needsto be regarded as a school-wide responsibility assumed in the context of a strongcollaborative culture (Rosenholtz, 1989; Smylie, 1995; Dynak et al., 1997), and havepraised the organization of programs which focus on the school as opposed to individualclassrooms as sites for practicum experiences (Zeichner, 1986, 1990; Watkins & Whalley,1993; Feiman-Nemser, 2001).

As Feiman-Nemser et al. (1999) observe, conceptualizing beginning teaching as a processof socialization ‘focuses attention on the occupational setting and professional communitywithin which new teachers are entering, the messages they receive about what it means tobe a teacher, and how these messages influence their emerging identity and practice’ (p.4). But the question of how much influence student teaching plays in the teachersocialization process has received two clearly distinct responses. For authors such as Lortie(1975), and Tabachnick and Zeichner (1984), the major socializing force that influencesteachers is their internalization of teacher models during their long period as pupils inclassrooms. For others—such as Hoy and Rees (1977)—on the contrary, the effects of thisearly socialization are washed out by the actual work environments where teachers work,although these environments do not totally determine the course of events in teachers’professional lives. For yet another group of authors, in secondary schools, even more thanthe school, it is the department which functions as teachers’ major frame of reference(Siskin, 1994; Siskin & Little, 1995). This paper explores the importance of this latterparticular socialization context in student teachers’ immersion into teaching.

THE STUDY

The study on which this paper is based involved two case studies of Portuguesesecondary-school English departments. The two departments were selected because eachwas integrated in a distinct type of school: one existed at Uptown Secondary, a large, oldtraditional school, comprising nearly 200 teachers, that was built initially as a vocationalschool and later transformed into a comprehensive secondary organization in the mid-1970s; the other was part of Seaside Secondary, a middle-sized building with slightly over100 teachers that was built in the early 1980s to function as a comprehensive school fromthe outset, and that serves since then as a lighthouse institution for the promotion ofinformation and communication technologies in teaching. The two departments were alsoselected for having each a similar structure and a similarly-sized group of student teachers.

The main goal was to understand how the structure and the nature of professional contactswithin the schools, particularly those related to the supervision of student teachers in theirEnglish departments, was related to the overcoming or reinforcement of isolated practicein teaching.

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The student teaching units that were organized within each of the two departments werecomprised a group of four student teachers and a cooperating teacher who was formallyappointed by the department. This cooperating teacher assumed full responsibility forin-site practicum supervision, with released time from regular classroom activities pro-vided by the local education authority. The cooperating teachers acted in an observing andevaluating role with regard to the student teachers. They were co-responsible for theassessment of student teachers’ teaching practice, along with one or two universitysupervisors, appointed among the faculty from the teacher education program at the localinstitution of higher education where the student teachers did their studies. According tothe teacher preparation program, the university supervisors and the cooperating teachermet regularly to discuss student teachers’ progress.

The student teaching program consisted of a year-long full-time teaching experience in theschools, complemented by weekly campus seminars. It represented the last segment of a5-year course, with 4 years of full-time study at the university campus. In this fieldexperience, the candidates assumed total teaching responsibility for two classes each. Theyfunctioned as regular teachers, with the informal status of a qualified teacher. The studentteachers earned a reduced salary and had a reduced teaching load, so that they coulddedicate specific times during the week to working with their cooperating teacher in theplanning and assessment of their teaching.

The formal arrangements required by this teacher training format included regularmeetings between each group of student teachers and its cooperating teacher, throughoutthe whole school year, where planning and feedback on performance occurred. A specifiednumber of classes given by the student teachers were observed by their student teachingcolleagues, the cooperating teacher, and some of them by the university educationalsupervisor as well.

In each department, data were collected through a social network questionnaire adminis-tered to the whole staff at the end of the school year, semi-structured interviews with twoexperienced teachers (one of them being the head of department) and semi-structuredinterviews with all the student teachers in both. Data were collected between September1996 and July 1997.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK QUESTIONNAIRE

All teaching staff in both departments filled in a social network questionnaire where theyindicated the colleagues with whom they established professional contacts throughout theyear. Teachers were also asked to indicate the frequency with which these contacts hadoccurred. Questions about the identity of interaction partners, and number and frequencyof contacts focused on six distinct areas of professional interaction: conversations aboutstudents, conversations about teaching practice, exchange of materials, joint developmentof materials, joint planning and joint teaching. This paper will focus only on two of thesetypes of interaction: joint development of materials, and joint planning.1

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Network questionnaire data provided quantitative and structural context information thathelped understand how participants’ interpretive and collaborative activity was anchoredin their wider work and training circumstances. From a methodological point of view, thecombination of social network analyses and interviews helped put teachers’ accounts intocontext. This avoided excessive reliance on particular reports of particular teachers.

THE INTERVIEWS

In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with two experienced teachers in eachdepartment, as well as with all the student teachers in both. The interviews with theexperienced teachers were conducted immediately after the close of the school year. Theinterviews focused on teachers’ accounts of collaboration, with a stress on their experi-ences, feelings, and interpretations of significant events in their professional lives inschools. The student teachers participated in four interviews each (at the beginning of theschool year, and after the close of each of the three terms into which the school year isorganized). Student teachers’ interviews focused particularly on the type of work in whichthey were involved, its frequency and content; group activities as compared to individualtasks completed within teacher training groups; collaborative relations within these groups;relations with other teachers in the school, particularly with department colleagues; andviews of the department and of the school in terms of collaborative relations.

Particularly attention was paid to specific areas of student teachers’ practical preparation,namely, individual versus group work as the regular pattern of activity among the studentteachers and between them and the remaining teachers in the department and in the school;student teachers’ development of learning and assessment tools, and of materials for theirstudents; and student teachers’ planning of their lessons. Analysis sought to determine ifstudent teacher activity in these areas was aimed at emphasizing the virtues and potentialof collaborative work or if, on the contrary, it stressed the value of learning and workingindependently.

WORK CONTEXTS, PRACTICES AND MEANINGS ATTACHED TO PRO-FESSIONAL RELATIONS

The narrative accounts of the teachers and the student teachers in the English departmentsat both schools are presented below. To contextualize participants’ interview accounts,sociograms were constructed which display departmental webs of professional relations.

The English Department at Uptown Secondary

The English department at Uptown Secondary enjoyed the reputation of being a ‘collabo-rative department’. It comprised 18 members, totalling about 14% of the school’s teachingstaff. It was clearly one of the departments in Uptown Secondary where the range ofteachers’ professional relations with department colleagues was widest.

Figures 1 and 2 show how informal professional relations within the department were

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----------------- 1 to 5 times6 or more times

FIG. 1. Professional relations in the English department at Uptown Secondary: joint development ofmaterials.

structured throughout the school year, with respect to the joint preparation of instructionalmaterials, and the joint planning of lessons.2 These sociograms portray several importantfeatures of the structure of professional relations within the department. In relationsentailing the joint development of materials (Figure 1), two teachers (Natalie andTheodora) were unconnected professionally to any of their department colleagues. Impor-tantly, Natalie was the English cooperating teacher, and Theodora was one of its threestudent teachers. Moreover, another three teachers (Lola, Shelly, and Rebecca, the lattertwo also being student teachers) were involved in strictly dyadic professional relationswith their department colleagues in this particular type of professional interaction.

If we restrict our focus to frequent contacts, many more teachers appear to be isolated orinvolved in merely dyadic connections, which suggests a much less connected departmentthan it appeared to be (this is visualized graphically by focusing only on the continuouslines connecting teachers in the sociograms).

Moreover, subgroups of teachers with more than two members where there were strongties between all members were relatively rare, and all were small in size. The only onesthat existed were two triads: Vera, Pam, and Amanda; and Linda, Rosemary, and Hillary.In the joint planning of lessons (Figure 2), the relational patterns were basically the same.

Information collected through the interviews shows that, in this department, some of theteachers were particularly active in joint work with other colleagues in their grade levels.

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FIG. 2. Professional relations in the English department at Uptown Secondary: joint planning of lessons.

But interviewees explained that, when teachers in the department taught in more than onegrade (as was the case with most of them), it was generally accepted that they participatedonly in one of the several grade-level teams that existed.

Leona (the head of department) regarded critically the internal process of most currentjoint work that went on in the subgroups. As she put it: ‘It is not a hundred percentteamwork. (…) there is always one colleague or another who heads the work and theothers follow along and help here and there.’

Moreover, the interviews with Leona and Vera—another experienced teacher in thedepartment—also made it clear that the practical and strategic side of their teaching withinthe classroom was not usually the object of joint work with other colleagues. Often, thebasic focus of teamwork in the English department was on general design and curriculumissues, rather than on specific pedagogical matters.

Vera was even more critical than Leona about the state of professional collaboration withinthe department. She remarked that, in spite of the call for organizing professional work bygrade levels, there were teachers who did not attend the meetings that did take place.

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Moreover, her personal participation in grade level teamwork had been disappointing,because she felt teacher involvement in it was uneven.

These subgroups by grades are absolutely impervious from one another. Somegrades work together, planning lesson by lesson. This is the case of the lowergrades, where anyone could substitute anyone else in the class without disruptingthe work that has been planned. As to group work occurring in the other grades,it is absolutely ‘drifting’. In these grades, people select texts but they seldomdiscuss actual approaches to these texts or to the student exercises, and whenthey eventually do that, it is very superficially and people never take notes ofanything.

Thus, in spite of the department’s prominent position as a collaborative unit within theschool, actual teacher interaction within it was regarded by two of its most experiencedmembers as generally weak, inconsistent, and inconsequential. And what about the studentteachers in the department? What was their experience? Were they aware of thesepatterns? If so, how did they make sense of them? Did they fit into the usual patterns ofwork that prevailed in their department or did they seek to counteract them?

Figures 1 and 2 reveal the way these student teachers (represented in the sociograms bythe oval figures) were integrated into the department with respect to the two types ofprofessional interaction under analysis. Professionally speaking, they virtually lived in aworld apart from the remaining members. Their connections with the more experiencedcolleagues were null. Even more significantly, their ties to Natalie, their cooperatingteacher, were also weak, to say the least. Besides, Natalie herself was a relatively marginalmember in the department. Moreover, student teachers’ connections among themselveswere also weak. Such a state of affairs has its own history.

During the first term, the teacher training group held three scheduled formal workmeetings per week, which lasted for an average of 2 hours each. Initially, group workfocused mainly on curriculum analysis. Then Natalie handed over some lesson plans thatshe had prepared herself, directing the student teachers to use them in their first classes.After this initial phase, lesson planning was formally carried out together within thetraining group, but the student teachers felt that the cooperating teacher ‘did practicallyeverything herself’ (Rebecca 2).3 This was followed by a first set of classes that were givenby the students and observed by the cooperating teacher, for which each student teacherdeveloped her own lesson plans individually.

Throughout this term, there was little joint work among the three student teachers whenthe cooperating teacher was not present. The development of plans for their classes wascarried out on the basis of an exclusively individual connection that each established withher. Rebecca, for example, justified this by saying that ‘we are expected to be very originaland we can’t influence one another’ (Rebecca 2). This expectation was continuouslyemphasized by the cooperating teacher.

The observed classes began in mid November. During this first period of class observation

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(which lasted until mid December), lesson planning was developed on an entirelyindividual basis. Formal joint meetings were used to deal collectively with other workissues, namely, the development of achievement tests for the pupils. But, throughout thewhole term, no actual joint work went on between the student teachers. Basically,interaction among them consisted of exchanges of general impressions on work issues,which were particularly rare and superficial with respect to the development of plans forthe classes.

During the second term, in addition to the number of weekly meetings that had beenagreed upon, it was often necessary to hold extraordinary conferences, either because theworkload grew heavier or because it was necessary to discuss and to evaluate collectivelyeach student teacher’s performance in the observed classes. During this term, the achieve-ment tests and the worksheets that the student teachers used in their classes were alldeveloped individually by them. Shelly justified this by saying that ‘I think that’s becausewe have to learn to gradually do things by ourselves. There comes a time when thesupervisor says, “Now you are going to work” ’ (Shelly 2).

But, with the exception of plans for observed classes, the actual planning of lessonscontinued to be virtually done by the cooperating teacher herself, not the student teachers.In other words, student teachers either worked with plans that they had developedindividually (the ones for their observed classes) without any input from the othercolleagues, or with plans that Natalie had developed and that were subsequently handedover to them. Neither of these two modalities of work implied a significant level ofcollaborative interaction.

In the third term, an interesting development occurred with respect to lesson planning. Thecooperating teacher decided that one of Rebecca’s plans was ‘outstanding’ and that itshould be adopted by the other two student teachers in their respective classes. Althoughthis meant a modification of the previous practice of using the cooperating teacher’s plansin student teachers’ classes, it still implied that plans were not developed and agreed uponcollectively, but instead were produced by a particular person and then used by the others.

The third term was a very difficult period for the student teachers, both professionally andemotionally. Evaluation issues began to creep into the already fragile personal relationsthey had with one another and with the cooperating teacher:

There was not much space for sharing our emotions. (…) It was a difficult periodfor the three of us. The group never did work as a group … It was just theemphasizing of the fact that our group was actually either one plus one plus one,or two plus one [Rebecca and Theodora, on the one hand, and Shelly, on theother]. (…) In some of the other teacher training groups, there was a greaterspirit of mutual support among group members which gave way to differentresults. (Shelly 4)

Student teachers’ progressive professional and personal distancing from one another wasparalleled by scant and generally weak relations with the other department members.

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Relations with department colleagues were sporadic and unsystematic, and professionalissues were usually not addressed in these contacts.

Individualization of work, lack of contact with more experienced colleagues, as well asminimal ties with the department head, were complemented by a progressively deteriorat-ing connection with Natalie. Feelings that Natalie had a manifest preference for Rebeccain detriment to Theodora and Shelly made the climate within the group grow sour. By theend of the second term, Rebecca herself had become aware that most departmentcolleagues believed that Natalie was ‘hard to get along with within the department’, andthat there were several conflict-laden relations between her and other teachers in theschool.

The effects of Natalie’s approach to practice training activities were particularly visible inthe case of the student teacher who started out with greater difficulties in English: Shelly.Shelly’s testimonies illustrate the way her doubts and uncertainties as a student teacherwere generally regarded by the English cooperating teacher:

We never had a close relationship, one where I could go to her and discussproblems or express my doubts. Because, whenever I did, she would make mefeel bad for having asked … Sincerely, I don’t think that it’s a crime to beteaching for the first time and to have doubts about how you’re going to gradea test and ask someone who is more experienced about it. And she made me feellike it was a silly question. (Shelly 4)

As time progressed, student teachers’ perceptions of the professional context around themalso grew richer in discriminative ability and detail. Shelly’s interviews provide a goodexample of this. While at the end of the first term she had a positive evaluation ofcollaborative activity within the department, in the second term she learned that collabora-tion was not a characteristic of the department as a whole but rather of particularsubgroups of people within it:

I know that, at least in principle, teachers in each grade should get together andplan their activities jointly … I know that some teachers do in fact work togetherand I know that others don’t. For example, I know that in one of the grades somepeople always manage to find an excuse for not attending planning meetings,because they have to do this or they have to do that, and they don’t show upwhen it gets to working together. (Shelly 3)

In addition, the student teachers gradually began to look at the department as an arenawhere there were important tensions between key actors and subterranean struggles forprivilege (e.g. better timetables) and influence. A critical event that changed their frame ofperception of the department was a discussion that occurred at a department meeting in thethird term concerning the assignment of teaching tasks for the subsequent school year.This was an occasion where competitiveness between department members becameespecially visible. In particular, the student teachers were struck by realizing that virtuallyeveryone in the department declined to teach in the most advanced grade in the followingyear. Shelly described this most explicitly:

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There was virtually a verbal war to see who would take the grade and, amongthe tenured teachers, no one, but really no one would take it. (…) But the mostinteresting part was that they asked us if we intended to remain in the schoolnext year. Rebecca said yes, so the department head suggested she took thegrade! (…) So it left me wondering: why don’t the teachers who have moreyears of experience want to teach that grade? They have to prepare the studentsto apply for their university courses. (…) Probably they don’t want extra work.And perhaps they also don’t want their competence to be questioned, forexample, if the students have low marks in their university application exams.(Shelly 4)

Thus, the student teachers gradually became aware of the micropolitical dimension ofmuch professional interaction within the department. In particular, they realized that therewas a struggle for informal power between Leona (the current head of department) andNatalie (the English cooperating teacher, and former department head). Theodora realizedthis micropolitical dimension of the department’s life, and began to believe that depart-ment members were ‘extremely competitive’. And she added:

In department meetings, it is perfectly clear that there is a group in there whostands against the head of department. I think each person tries to stand out asthe one who teaches his or her classes best, or the one who has better materials.You also notice … for example, if there are worksheets and one of the teachershas the solutions for the exercises … there is this unwillingness to provide thesolutions to the others. (…) It is perfectly clear that there are people in there whohave a greater affinity with one another and that there are people who mutuallyreject one another. (Theodora 3)

A 10-month exposure to (and participation in) a relational context such as the onedescribed above had powerful effects on the way Uptown Secondary’s student teacherscame to regard teaching as an occupation. Although bitterly, all of them came to regardindividualistic practice as the norm, as the accepted and expected way of working inschools. This was expressed most poignantly by Shelly, the most isolated of the threestudent teachers. Shelly felt that her training experience had inhibited her from developingrelations with others in general. In her final evaluation of the training period and of theexperiences she had gone through, she stated:

As a person, I’ve learned a lot. But I’m not sure that I’ve learned the things Iwanted to. I was a very credulous person, even naive, and I slammed my headin the wall several times this year. Of course, I had to learn from that. But thatmade me become more reticent and self-contained. I didn’t want people to speakto me. I didn’t want to relate to anyone. I didn’t want to become attached, andI don’t think that’s positive! It’s never positive when you get locked insideyourself. I’ve learned and in one sense it has done me well, because I’ve becomemore cautious. And I have to be prepared because throughout my life I’m goingto meet all kinds of people. I think you need to be prepared for that.

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FIG. 3. Professional relations in the English department at Seaside Secondary: joint development ofmaterials.

Now let us look at the culture of the English department at Seaside Secondary and theinduction experiences of its student teachers. As we shall see, despite some importantdifferences, professional relations in this department also shared several of the character-istics that have been identified in Uptown Secondary.

The English Department at Seaside Secondary

The English department at Seaside Secondary was somewhat smaller in size whencompared to the one at Uptown Secondary: it comprised 12 teachers, representing around12% of the school’s total teaching staff. In contrast to the previous English department,this department was not known in its school for putting an emphasis on collaborativerelations.

As shown in Figures 3 and 4, most of the joint development of materials and of the jointplanning relations that existed in Seaside’s English department resulted in infrequentcontacts among colleagues. For example, in relations aimed at developing materials jointly(Figure 3), the only frequent ties that existed connected Karen to Marvin, Karen toRichard, and Karen to Kathy. If Karen was discarded from the sociogram, no frequent tieswould exist in it. Moreover, none of the other connections in the department wasparticularly intense. This was even more apparent in the joint planning of lessons (Figure4), an area in which only Sharon and Cynthia established a more consistent professional

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FIG. 4. Professional relations in the English department at Seaside Secondary: joint planning of lessons.

relation with each other. Furthermore, in the latter type of interaction, three of the teachersin the department (Richard, Liz, and Marvin) were connected to no one else, and nodepartment member interacted with more than two different colleagues. Actually, apartfrom Karen, Kathy, and Ruth, none made contact with more than one departmentcolleague. In the same kind of professional relation, the sociogram’s level of connectionrelies heavily on only one teacher, Dina—the cooperating teacher. In fact, if Dina wassubtracted from either sociogram, the department’s network of ties would become muchmore fragmented.

In this department, in spite of Kathy’s—the head of department—various efforts tostimulate the formation of subgroups that would work jointly by grade levels, attempts hadbeen relatively unsuccessful and joint work was generally inconsistent. As Karen (anexperienced teacher) put it when asked about joint approaches to professional matters inthe department, Seaside’s English teachers ‘didn’t work much in that fashion’. The typicalbehavior was described by her as participating in an initial department meeting for formalplanning at the beginning of the year, which was followed by ‘more sporadic contact’throughout the year, either to exchange materials or to check the way lesson planningdeadlines were being met by the different teachers.

The interview testimonies with the experienced teachers thus point to an unsystematic,

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mostly occasional, and usually superficial collaborative approach to work matters in thedepartment. In her evaluation of the way department members had worked together duringthe school year, Kathy expressed a bitter sense of disappointment. She felt that departmentmembers had done ‘very little beyond what is bureaucratically compulsory’. She was sorrythat teachers took one another for granted and that they did not put in enough effort tomake the department work more cohesively. This was regarded by her as hinderingstudents’ educational development.

Now let us see how the four English student teachers at Seaside—Sharon, Judy, Rob, andCynthia—viewed and experienced this relational context.

The first working meeting between the student teachers and Dina, the English cooperatingteacher, was held in early September. However, the student teachers reported that thefollowing meetings were systematically delayed by Dina. This generated a large dose ofuncertainty among them that was expressed repeatedly in their first interviews. Beforeclasses began, no other meeting with Dina took place.

During the first two weeks of classes, the student teachers approached lesson planningjointly, but subsequently their planning was accomplished mostly individually. Eachdeveloped his or her own plans and then showed them to the cooperating teacher, whowould make comments before the plans were applied in the classroom. Asked about whythe plans for the observed lessons were developed separately by each student teacher,Cynthia replied:

That’s because we’re being evaluated. Evaluation is an individual process, sowe’re not going to work as a group. We’re supposed to plan and teach ourclasses by ourselves. (Cynthia 2)

Although some comments or requests for help did occur among the student teachers, mostwere superficial in nature and had no relevant impact on how the planning was actuallycarried out. Rob characterized the nature of the exchanges among the student teachers inthe following way:

We have brief conversations. You may be sitting there somewhere before you goand give a class, and you may express some doubts about how you’re going toteach something: if you’re going to use this question, if you’re going to start outwith an exercise or something, how you’re going to relate this to that … but itwas very quick, and the other person would also reply very quickly. Wewouldn’t sit and talk about it … (Rob 2)

Rob’s second interview, in particular, gave invaluable insight into how, as early as the endof the first school term, collaborative relations had already been settled as only needing tobe minimal within the teacher training group:

I think we only worked together in the beginning of the term, in the first 2 or3 weeks. That’s because we didn’t know how to plan our classes adequately, so

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there was this need for getting together and supporting one another and meetingto plan. From the moment we started planning by ourselves and we planned forour observed lessons, we started splitting up and working more individually.This reached a climax during the period of observed classes. Everyone did hisor hers in isolation. No one ever helped anyone else. There might be sporadichelp, but it would be very light. (Rob 2)

According to the student teacher’s views, during the second term, Dina’s professionalbehavior as cooperating teacher worsened. For example, she ‘systematically’ missed theformal group meetings that she had arranged with the student teachers. Also, the meetingsthat did take place were shorter in duration than previous ones. In addition, and contraryto many other student teacher groups in the school and elsewhere, extraordinary meetingswere never held for dealing with emerging issues. In short, even in formal, compulsorycircumstances, the student teachers spent less and less time with one another, as well aswith their cooperating teacher.

While in the first term the achievement tests that the student teachers developed for theirstudents were sometimes discussed collectively, from the second term on they wereelaborated only individually. Moreover, an interesting development occurred in this latterperiod: the student teachers informally agreed that they would exchange their plans for theobserved classes, as well as their achievement tests. Since each had prepared and plannedfor a different segment of the curriculum, this meant that, by exchanging their tests andplans, they were free from having to plan for the remaining lessons until the end of theschool year. This not only dispensed with the need to meet with others to plan collectively;it also dispensed with the very need to plan at all. Thus, using colleagues’ individuallydeveloped plans was not an expression of collaborative behaviour within the group,because it actually dispensed with the need for professional collaboration.

By the end of the second term, some of the few illusions that the student teachers had hadabout sharing and mutual support in teaching were being subjected to extensive question-ing. Rob, in particular, experienced a deep internal conflict between his images of whatteaching ought to be and what he felt it really was:

I think that in the second term I’ve become more aware of how this [the practicetraining process] really works. Now I know what I should expect. (…) In the firstterm, I thought … I knew each would have to present his or her individual work,but I never thought the individual side of it would be so valued and that eachwould be so strictly concerned exclusively with him- or her-self. The practicetraining year has positive things but it can be dangerous because people canbecome extremely self-contained and … I think individual work is valued somuch in this period that it can become a habit. Besides, we spend about 10months together … it’s a way of thinking in which you don’t show the mostimportant things to other people, in which you almost wish things will rununfavourably for them. (…) Teachers may value group work very much, but thepractice year is not leading people into that direction. (Rob 3)

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During the third term, professional relations between the student teachers were intenselyconstrained by their concerns with their own individual evaluation. The only formalcollective meetings that took place in the teacher training group were appointed forevaluating each student teacher’s observed classes. In the interviews, all of them reportedhaving experienced a strong urge to criticize other’s work as much as possible in thesemeetings.

In the beginning of the school year, the student teachers had felt that their SeasideSecondary colleagues related very well to one another from a social point of view. Butwith regard to work issues, they progressively held a much more critical view. Forexample, while during the first term Cynthia felt that teachers were open to discussing theirwork and to providing professional advice and support to one another, in the second termshe thought there was ‘not much dialogue and conversation’ and that each was ‘exclu-sively concerned with his or her own work’. Rob too believed that underneath the schoolstaff’s apparently ‘good relations’ there were hidden and problematic realities, namely,frivolousness, and emotional distancing:

I don’t believe we should call it ‘relating’ at all. Teachers only relate to oneanother when they are forced to. Beyond that, they only entertain that sort ofsmall talk during intermission periods where they talk about the most diverseissues. But to say that they relate to one another … There may be cases whereteachers are friends and have good relations with each other, but those cases arevery few. In general, there are no strong relations among teachers. They talkabout trivial and trifling things. (Rob 3)

In short, the student teachers gradually built the image that the school had a congenialculture, but not a collegial one. In particular, they became disappointed with what theyregarded as a lack of discussion of important professional issues within their department.For example, Judy described department colleagues as ‘conformist’ and ‘uninterested’. Ina similar vein, in her third interview, Cynthia lamented that she had profited very littlefrom interacting with her more experienced department colleagues:

There is absolutely no sharing. (…) There is no attempt to achieve consensus onteaching or on achievement criteria. Besides, no one interferes with how othersbehave in the classroom, with their planning, what they teach in their classes,how they assess their students. No one interferes. There are no common criteria.(Cynthia 3)

Together, these circumstances helped produce personal negative evaluations of the trainingexperience and of teaching in general. For example, in her final interview, Sharon said thatalthough she felt she had improved professionally, she also thought she had become morecynical. In a similar mood, in his final interview, Rob stated that he would adviseforthcoming student teachers to behave cautiously and to be attentive to the real intentionsbehind some colleagues’ apparently friendly behavior. Thus, overall, despite a morefavorable global interpersonal climate than in Uptown Secondary’s English department,the basic effect that the professional culture that prevailed in the English department inSeaside Secondary had on its student teachers was very similar: the stimulation of astrongly individualized socialization into teaching and the consequent emergence of

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disappointment and cynicism in student teachers’ views of teachers’ relations with oneanother.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings in this study can be organized into two distinct but complementary sections:one on the overall nature of the professional cultures that prevailed in the two departmentsat Uptown Secondary and Seaside Secondary, and the other on the central role that thesocialization of newcomers played in the understanding of the nature of these cultures.Both of these issues have, of course, implications for the training of beginning teachersthat will be explored throughout the discussion.

We have seen that the cultures of the two departments had a strong impact on the way theirstudent teachers were socialized into teaching. How can we characterize these cultures?What did they have in common? Were there significant differences between them?

Both departments may be described as interactively asymmetric, since both encompassedsubgroups of members (as well as isolated members) that displayed significantly distinctlevels of professional interaction. These interaction patterns contradict the assumption thatdepartments are homogeneous internally with respect to collaborative or isolated practices.The patterns that are revealed by the sociograms in this paper indicate that the webs ofprofessional relations within them took on complex shapes that are only poorly representedby the usual metaphorical and vague depictions that are presented in most of the availableliterature on teacher cultures. This helps do away with the romantic view of thecollaborative group. Collaborative schools and departments are often depicted in theliterature as harmonious and cohesive units where all members engage in rich, intense, andstimulating interactions with one another. Although such departments may in fact exist inparticular schools, in other organizations (perhaps, in most of them) the so-called‘collaborative’ departments (as is the case of Uptown’s English Department) may becomposed of various uneven layers of collaborative activity. How representative each ofthese situations is in a given country or region should not be taken for granted; it is rathera question deserving empirical examination.

There were also substantial differences between Uptown and Seaside’s English depart-ments. Perhaps the most important of these is that contrary to Seaside’s, Uptown’sdepartment was split into competing subgroups of teachers who struggled among them-selves over micropolitical issues. This calls attention to the complex interplay that mayexist between teachers’ immersion in new schools and the micropolitical realities of theseorganizations. Clearly, as Uptown’s example shows, new teachers can get caught in themiddle of a battlefield that opposes different factions of a school or a department, withlittle chances of developing ties to the school or the department as a whole, or even to anyof the competing factions within it. This has obvious consequences for the way theydevelop perspectives and work habits, as well as for their emerging views of realcollaboration in schools.

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The English department at Uptown Secondary is best described as a balkanized one.Indeed, the main defining characteristics of Hargreaves’ (1994) model of balkanizationseem especially suited to describe the nature of the relations within it: subgroups ofcollaborating teachers were strongly insulated from one another (low permeability); someof these subgroups had been formed several years before and their membership hadchanged very little over time (high permanence), and there was competition for power andinfluence between some of these subgroups (political complexion). Thus, balkanizationmay not be solely a characteristic of whole-school cultures, but also a structural feature ofparticular departments within them. This suggests that Hargreaves’ model of balkanizationmay need to be modified, in order to account for these kinds of intra-departmental realities.

Seaside Secondary’s English department, on the other hand, is best described by Siskin’s(1994) model of bundled departments. Siskin describes this type of department as onewhere there is more cooperation than collaboration, and where individual concerns prevailover collective objectives, at less cost to individual autonomy. In these departments,sharing occurs, but in a limited form; it involves exchange of materials and information,but leaves out actual curriculum choices and practices in the classroom, and collectivediscussions of teaching issues. In these units, teachers’ relations are friendly and non-com-petitive, but professional issues are seldom addressed collectively, and professionalcontacts are expressed almost exclusively in occasional, superficial exchanges of impres-sions and (less frequently) materials.

Overall, the data in this study point to the importance of the department (even more thanthe school) in the socialization of student teachers, a finding that is in agreement withMcLaughlin’s (1993) work on the centrality of the department in teachers’ professionallives in schools. Thus, although Lortie (1975) has argued that teacher socialization iscomplete before student teachers actually begin their work in schools, the impact of aschool’s relational context (and especially that of the department where the studentteachers are trained) on the way they build their self-concepts as teachers should not beunderestimated. The process of organizational socialization within schools and depart-ments may be more powerful than some suggest.

In this paper, student teachers’ experiences over their first practice year were givenparticular attention. The study gave due credit to their voices and this helped gain a richerunderstanding of their views and experiences of collaboration. The data show that the waya culture welcomes and deals with its newcomers is a fundamental indicator of its nature.In both departments, the student teachers were socialized through isolationist processesand were treated as a separate category of teachers; their contacts with experiencedteachers were minimal and the few formal ties that they entertained within the department(especially with their cooperating teacher) were strongly hierarchical and evaluative innature, which eroded the potential support that might come from these connections. Theserelational patterns sent student teachers clear messages about the way they were perceivedand about their standing in the department and in the school.

The supportive and open characteristics of collaborative teacher cultures described by

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authors such as Nias and colleagues (1989), McLaughlin (1993) and Hargreaves (1994)were clearly absent from these student teachers’ accounts of their first year of professionalexperience. The professional ‘ghetto’ into which they were thrown in both departments isclearly visible in the sociograms, where student teacher groups show as separate entitieswhose only substantive connections to the department were made through the cooperatingteacher.

The significance of departmental relations for beginning teachers’ immersion in teachingis thus one of the more critical issues raised by the findings in the study. In the first yearof professional experience in teaching, student teachers go through a sequence of rites ofpassage (White, 1989; Berman, 1994) whereby they are transformed (and also transformthemselves) into professionals. In this beginning year, one of the most powerful forms oflearning is ‘the conscious crafting of an identity, with the discovery and reshaping of theself’ (Featherstone, 1993, p. 110). This paper shows that this personal restructuring takesplace in a relational context and that the nature of this context has substantial impact onhow forthcoming teachers come to view their role and themselves as teachers.

In a recent paper, Williams et al. (2001) have criticized Hargreaves’ (1994) notion ofcontrived collegiality, proposing instead the term ‘structural collaboration’ to account forinstances were intentionally designed and mandatory formal systems of teacher collabora-tion give rise to positive relations among colleagues. However, it seems that it is not thestructural arrangements themselves that are positive or negative for teachers, but whatactually occurs within them. As this paper has shown, even highly structured programs ofteacher training intent on stimulating collaborative work may reinforce traditional normsand practices, rather than promote joint modes of work. In the two case studies, the studentteachers met regularly with a cooperating teacher appointed by the school, they enjoyedthe formal opportunity to observe each other’s classes, and they experienced structuredoccasions for giving and receiving detailed feedback on their performance. Nonetheless, inspite of the regular structuring of relationships among the different parties involved, thesearrangements served basically to transmit technical knowledge and to enact evaluationprocedures that were highly individualistic. The student teachers were thus socialized intoa view of teaching as the production of individualized acts and products for which onlythe person who plans and performs them is accountable. The setting of evaluation criteriaby the cooperating teachers that urged the student teachers to be ‘creative’—as a synonymof ‘unique’ and ‘different’—decisively strengthened this deeply individualized approach totheir work. In the absence of a surrounding culture that welcomed and nurtured collabora-tive work as an accepted daily way of dealing with teaching matters, the initial teachertraining arrangements that existed ended up serving the cause of individual survival. Byinsisting on individual planning, the independent development of materials and theindividualized assessment of teacher performance, teacher training practices promoted andreinforced a culture of professional isolation, even within a formal framework that at firstsight seemed ideally tailored for putting a prime value on collaborative work.

Of course, socialization is rarely a linear and completely finished process; on the contrary,it is usually ‘complex, interactive, negotiated, provisional’ and besides internalizedadjustment, student teachers can also show mere strategic compliance or achieve a

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strategic redefinition of the situation (Lacey, 1977, p. 22; also Tickle, 2000). But the datain this paper show that the student teachers did not question the idea of teaching as anessentially individualistic process. Although they did criticize the professional cultures intowhich they were immersed, their critique did not go as far as to challenge the fundamentalassumptions that characterized those cultures. In particular, they did not question thecentral underlying assumption that the fundamental goal of beginning teachers’ prep-aration is to make them capable of developing their practice independently.

How can future teachers become collaborative professionals and learners if such a vitalphase of their preparation lies so heavily on this unquestioned truth about the nature ofteaching? In their analysis of the persistence of a fundamental ‘grammar’ of schooling overtime, Tyack and Cuban (1995) suggest that dominant patterns of educational provisionhave survived the years not so much as a consequence of conscious conservatism butrather as a result of unexamined institutional modes of operation and widespread culturalbeliefs about what constitutes ‘real teaching’. It seems that these strong taken for grantedassumptions about how to prepare new teachers were at the heart of the individualizedconceptions of practice that dominated much of teacher supervision and mentoringprocedures in the two departments that were studied. Unless we begin to question andchallenge these a priori, often hidden and unrealized assumptions about the nature ofteaching, future teachers will continue to be trained for professional isolation, notcollaboration.

NOTES

[1] Joint teaching was virtually non-existent in both schools.[2] Frequent relations are represented by continuous lines, and infrequent relations by dashed ones.

Frequent relations were defined as those entailing contacts occurring six or more times during theyear. Infrequent ones were defined as those that ranged from 1 to 5 encounters.

[3] A digit beside an interviewee’s name indicates the inverview from which a quote is extracted. Thus,Rebecca 2 means that the excerpt was extracted from Rebecca’s second interview.

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