This study explores the motivations, perceptions, and imagery of beginning teachers in Lebanon. It foregrounds the importance of ‘images’ as potentially useful conceptual tools for understanding the developing identities of beginning teachers. The research consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews in which student-teachers are encouraged to reflect on their own and other people’s views and perceptions about teaching. The thesis places the students-teachers’ personal portraits of teaching within broader cultural-historical representations of teachers in Lebanon and examines how the student-teachers deal with such representations while still in training. The core research questions focus on the participants’ motivations as well as the underlying cultural, social, and political factors that influence their views and perceptions about teaching. The research questions were designed to explore the various images of teachers and teaching that the students draw on in their personal portraits. Biographical information as well as students’ experiences at the time of training were explored for this purpose. The findings suggest that student-teachers’ developing identities emerge through their identification with competing images and representations of teaching and teachers. These images cut across various contexts, temporalities, and imagined settings in the student-teacher portraits, linking personal, educational and professional experiences. Many of the images synthesized large amounts of experiences and knowledge about teaching and contained gendered, religious, affective and interpersonal dimensions. Finally, the thesis offers a new way of conceptualizing images. This study hopes to help teacher education programs gain greater insight into beginning teachers’ thinking, motivations and developing identities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:627876 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Natout, Mahmoud |
| Contributors | Mills, David |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ce2eb267-8af6-4510-9681-2889a4f7dc8e |
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