Deterritorializing Dichotomies in Teacher Induction: A (Post)Ethnographic Study of Un/Becoming an Elementary Science Teacher

Un/becoming an elementary science teacher is a dynamic phenomenon, yet the process is often intentionally limited to several taken-for-granted assumptions in research on science teacher induction. Inherent to research on beginning science teacher induction is also the construction of certain truths beginning science teachers, science teacher educators, and researchers think, feel, and live. This study complicates prevailing truths shaping notions of beginner, novice, induction, and traditions of inquiry as an ethicopolitical commitment to those implicated. In doing so, this study illuminates more expansive ways science teacher educators and those studying induction might study and understand the experiences of beginning science teachers from both humanist and post-humanist ontological paradigms. To provide an intimate, in-depth, and multidimensional analysis of elementary science teacher induction experiences, feminist post-structural theory was employed throughout the study. This perspective further informed the post-foundational ethnographic practices shaping the structure of the study as an always-already emergent process. Taking form as a (post)ethnographic inquiry, the study specifically examined the induction experiences of two beginning elementary science teachers alongside three ontological dichotomies in research shaping science teacher induction: (a) the beginning science teacher subject; (b) the concept of induction; and (c) the mode of inquiry. Employing both conventional humanist qualitative methods and post-qualitative inquiry, this study reveals the multifaceted ways in which beginning elementary science teacher subjectivity, research assumptions, and definitions framing the very notion of elementary science teacher induction intra-act. Offering a series of provocations as lines of flight, researchers of science teacher induction and science teacher educators might begin to re-conceptualize ways beginning science teachers un/become known and get re/produced. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]