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Inhabitants Moving In: Prospective Sense‐Making and the Reproduction of Inhabited Institutions in Teacher Education
Author(s) -
Everitt Judson G.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1002/symb.56
Subject(s) - socialization , scholarship , reproduction , legitimacy , sociology , creativity , interactionism , symbolic interactionism , sociology of education , new institutionalism , perspective (graphical) , public relations , epistemology , social psychology , psychology , pedagogy , political science , social science , law , ecology , biology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , politics , computer science
This article advances the scholarship on inhabited institutions with analysis of the professional socialization of new teachers. My findings show that incoming teachers develop a perspective I call an “injunction to adapt” to prospective classroom contingencies, and define this as fundamental to effective teaching. Teacher candidates become primed to perform prospective work in ways that are tightly‐coupled with institutional mandates of public schools in some ways, and loosely‐coupled with them in others. I argue that attention to professional socialization highlights the ways that people's sense‐making can be prospective and anticipatory as well as ongoing and retrospective. Furthermore, I argue that analyzing professional socialization as a process of “interpretive reproduction” offers fruitful opportunity to wed the key strengths of symbolic interactionism with new institutionalism, as it reveals ways in which interaction and sense‐making can serve to reproduce and maintain the legitimacy of institutional logics while also serving as a source of individual creativity.