This study draws on oral histories conducted with participants in the National Teacher Corps (a 1965 Great Society alternative route to teaching designed to get the “best and brightest” into the profession) to examine their motivations, experiences and career paths. Though voices from the classroom are an important source of ...
(Show more)This study draws on oral histories conducted with participants in the National Teacher Corps (a 1965 Great Society alternative route to teaching designed to get the “best and brightest” into the profession) to examine their motivations, experiences and career paths. Though voices from the classroom are an important source of information about teaching and a critical aspect of educational history, in general, teachers have left little evidence of their experiences or the meanings they made of it. Indeed, while the perspectives of the federal reformers who created the NTC are well documented, firsthand accounts of the NTC participants’ lived experiences as teachers and the lessons they may offer remain untapped.
My paper uses these firsthand accounts specifically to reconsider traditional American interpretations of teachers and their work, especially in terms of their identities, qualifications, and motivations for teaching. How were the NTC participants like or different from traditional teacher candidates and the existing teachers – and students – with whom they worked? What incentives brought them to the Corps and to teaching? What were their expectations and experiences in the classroom? Who stayed in the field of education? Who left and why? And finally, what, if any, lasting impact did participating in the NTC have on their professional lives and political outlook?
Using oral histories conducted with participants who entered the National Teacher Corps between 1966-69, the paper not only sheds light on participants’ expectations for and experiences of teaching, it additionally attends to the ways in which the telling of these life stories provided opportunities for subjects to construct and reconstruct their understandings of their lives.
(Show less)