Education Commons^™

The Business Of Learning To Teach: A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of One Teacher's Journey, Lauren Gatti, Theresa Catalano

Lauren Gatti

This article analyzes the learning to teach process of one novice teacher, Rachael, enrolled in an Urban Teacher Residency (UTR) in Harbor City, United States. Building on Loh and Hu's (2014) scholarship on neoliberalism and novice teachers, we employ Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) to make visible the ways in which Rachael contends with conflicting frames of learning to teach--TEACHING IS A JOURNEY vs. TEACHING IS A BUSINESS--within her program. Rachael encounters three primary obstacles: programmatic incompatibility, pedagogical paralysis, and, ultimately, programmatic abandonment. The discussion explores the potential consequences of learning to teach in neoliberal contexts.