Transformative Teaching: The Stories Aspiring Teachers Tell of the Teachers Who Made a Difference

Abstract

Transformative teaching (teaching to make a difference) is education for growth in students, through intentional, creative action and purposeful engagement in identity formation. The desire to make a difference in students’ lives is at the heart of all curriculum theory and practice and is especially relevant as a purpose for teaching in teacher education programs with students who are working to create personal teacher identities. It is the primary reason teacher education students give, every year, for choosing to become a teacher. A commitment to the pursuit of excellence, expressed in a language of hope, with the purpose of creating a good life, within a relationship of care between teacher and students, is necessary to teaching to make a difference in students’ lives. Transformative teaching is a significant alternative to the test-driven status quo of American educational theory because, although it is a practical and theoretic struggle, it allows for a renewed emphasis on personal excellence for students through the guiding relationship of care with a teacher committed to making a difference in students’ lives. This narrative research project investigated the impact of transformative teaching on the teacher identity formation of undergraduates pursuing certification in the School of Education. The foundational question that drove this research was: How do School of Education undergraduates and the teachers they identify as transformative narrate the relationship of transformative teaching and how that relationship has informed the undergraduates’ identity formation as aspiring teachers and their decision to pursue a teaching career? This question was explored by collecting the stories students told of teachers who made a difference in their lives and comparing their stories to the stories told by those teachers identified as transformative, to learn what it is about teaching to transform that influenced aspiring teachers to choose education as a profession, as well as how teaching to make a difference might help transformative teachers have a rewarding career in which they may endure. Narrative research is an appropriate methodology for an investigation of identity formation through transformative teaching because it “assumes that storytelling is integral to understanding lives and that all people construct narratives as a process in constructing and reconstructing identity” (Marshall & Rossman, 2011, p. 23).