Complexity, Struggle, and the Dialogical Self: Learning from New Teachers to Shift the Paradigm of Teacher Education and Professional Learning

Getting started in any new profession can be daunting, but the learning curve associated with becoming a teacher is particularly steep given the complexity of both the act of teaching (e.g., planning lessons, assessing learning) and the roles teachers occupy (managing relationships, responding to policy directives) that new teachers must master with levels of support that are, historically, uneven. This transition is further complicated by simplistic notions that dominate conceptions of teacher learning and practice. This article draws upon a study of the challenges new teachers encounter and the participants' responses to those challenges. The data index the importance of viewing teacher development, practice, and identity formation from a complexity perspective. Working from the data generated during this study of the new teachers' lived experiences, which are situated against a backdrop of the literature chronicling a problematic lack of progress in supporting new teachers, this article describes how Dialogical Self theory can play a crucial role in a paradigm shift in approaches to teacher development and practice that accounts for complex and contextually dependent nature of teacher learning, practice, and identity formation.