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Revisiting Teaching Archetypes: Identifying Dominant Shaping Influences on

Student Teacher's Identities

Article  in  European Educational Research Journal · September 2004

DOI: 10.2304/eerj.2004.3.3.4

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 European Educational Research Journal, Volume 3, Number 3, 2004

Revisiting Teaching Archetypes:

identifying dominant shaping influences
on student teacher’s identities

CIARAN SUGRUE
St Patrick’s College, Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT The primary aim of this article is to identify and interrogate the lay
theories of contemporary student teachers and to indicate and illustrate the
manner in which these ‘theories’ manifest both continuity and change when
contrasted with teaching archetypes and previously articulated lay theories of
student teachers in the setting. It is in five parts. First, a theoretical lens of
teaching archetypes and lay theories is provided. Second, a succinct account of
the changing educational and policy context is provided. Third, data generation
and analysis are described. Fourth, emergent cultural themes are critically
analysed. Fifth, some tentative implications are drawn for initial teacher
education and further research.

What does teaching do to [student] teachers? This question opens the underside of
teaching, the private struggles we engage as we construct not only our teaching
practices and all the relationships this entails, but our teaching voices and
identities. (Britzman, 1991, p. 1)

Introduction
The questions posed by Britzman above are not new. What is new is the
rapidly changing contexts in which teachers engage in the processes of teaching
and learning in various systems that are at once being deregulated and subject
to market forces as well as a general tendency to privatize the public sphere
(Beck, 2000a). Globalisation, or glocalisation as Beck (2000) prefers to name it,
as a more accurate description of the asymmetrical relationship between the
local and the global, and the impact of the ‘infotainment telesector’ (Homer-
Dixon, 2001) is impacting very differently within national educational systems
depending on how these forces are ‘refracted’ at national and local levels

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(Goodson, 2004). Consequently, there is a growing tendency also to increase

regulation of teacher education, to mandate and to prescribe particular kinds of
programmes, their requirements and delivery as well as the process of
certification and re-certification. This kind of hyper-rationality applied to
teachers’ lives and work is a major disjuncture with Government mandates that
increasingly broaden the role of teachers to include care and concern, to foster
self-esteem, identity and citizenship while simultaneously seeking also to
develop skills that are marketable in the global economy and to boost
individual country’s market share and to improve a competitive edge in the
‘Knowledge Economy’; to address simultaneously the knowledge economy
and the knowledge society (see Hargreaves, 2003; Stoll et al, 2003; Sugrue,
2004).
It is appropriate in such circumstances to ask: what has teaching and
schooling already done to student teachers before entry to teacher education
programmes and what are the factors that appear to contribute most to the
making of their lay theories of teaching that we know from previous research
are already well formed, robust, tenacious and powerful?
The primary aim of this article is to identify and interrogate the lay
theories of contemporary student teachers and to indicate and illustrate the
manner in which these ‘theories’ manifest both continuity and change when
contrasted with teaching archetypes and previously articulated lay theories of
student teachers in the setting. It is in five parts. First, a theoretical lens of
teaching archetypes and lay theories is provided. Second, a succinct account of
the changing educational and policy context is provided. Third, data generation
and analysis are described. Fourth, emergent cultural themes are critically
analysed. Fifth, some tentative implications are drawn for initial teacher
education and further research.

Theoretical Perspectives: teaching archetypes

and lay theories of teaching
Analysis in this article takes for granted the importance of personal narrative,
metaphor and experienced knowledge as having significance for student
teachers’ lay theories (Elbaz, 1983; Clandinin, 1986; Calderhead, 1987; Hunt,
1987; Pollard & Tann, 1987; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Clift et al, 1990; Day
et al, 1990; Johnson, 1992; Holt-Reynolds, 1992; Russell & Munby, 1992;
Calderhead & Gates, 1993). It also seeks to situate these theories within the
more broad-based ethnographic, historically and socially situated literature on
life-history and biography because of its significance for shaping the beliefs and
professional behaviours of teachers (Woods, 1985; Sikes et al, 1985; Ball &
Goodson, 1985; Goodson & Walker, 1991; Goodson, 1992). A contextualised
analysis of this nature is warranted because ‘the traditions through which
particular practices are transmitted and reshaped never exist in isolation from
larger social traditions’ (Goodson, 1992, p. 242). Due to the absence of such
inquiry I have turned to Irish literary sources to identify the archetypal

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 IDENTIFYING DOMINANT SHAPING INFLUENCES ON STUDENT TEACHERS’ IDENTITIES

contours of the ‘Master’ and the ‘Mistress’ (Sugrue, 1996, 1997, 1998b): both of
whom have assumed the status of ‘cultural myths in teaching [in the Irish
context] which provide a set of “ideal” images, definitions, justifications and
measures for thought and activity in schools’ (Day, 1993, p. 12). My analysis
assumes that these archetypes have significance for popular perceptions of
primary school teachers, an assumption that is supported by Wertsch’s
assertion that collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single,
committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces
events to mythic archetypes (Halbwachs, 1992, pp. 3-4, quoted in Wertsch,
2002, p. 19). Consequently, in addition to their ‘apprenticeships of observation’
(Lortie, 1975), these archetypes are a subterranean influence also on student
teachers’ orientation towards teaching as a career, their personal constructions
of themselves as intending teachers and their identification with teaching. The
personal and the wider socio-historical context of their schooling and
socialisation shape their reconstructions of these archetypes of teaching
through apprenticeship of observation and interaction with the sociocultural
forces of daily life. They are the ‘palimpsest’ from which their lay theories are
hewn (Southworth, 2002). Holt-Reynolds (1992, p. 326) describes lay theories
as:
beliefs developed naturally over time without the influence of instruction.
Pre-service teachers do not consciously learn them at an announced,
recognised moment from a formal teaching/learning episode. Rather, lay
theories represent tacit knowledge lying dormant and unexamined by the
student (see Barclay & Wellman, 1986). Developed over long years of
participation in and observation of classrooms (Lortie, 1975) and
teaching/learning incidents occurring in schools, homes or the larger
community (Measor, 1985; Sikes, 1987), lay theories are based on
untutored interpretations of personal, lived experiences.
The personal experiences of these student teachers form a nexus between their
apprenticeship of observation and the embedded cultural archetypes of
teaching. By deconstructing student teachers’ lay theories, therefore, insights
are gained into the most formative personal and social influences on their
professional identities. These insights are critical to the process and substance
of initial teacher education and subsequent professional growth. However,
because this theoretical framework has been previously developed and
published (see Sugrue, 1996, 1997, 1998b), a summary only is provided here,
sufficient to give a ‘flavour’ of the terrain and to ‘frame’ the subsequent
analysis.

The ‘Master’ and ‘Mistress’: cultural archetype of teaching

The terms master and mistress share identical origins in the Latin word
dominus: to be head of a household and servants, including slaves. Archetypal

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 Ciaran Sugrue

teachers are, therefore, people who dominate classrooms and students and
dictate the learning process through a transmission mode of teaching.
Traditional (archetypal) teaching is well documented in recent research
literature under such terms as ‘teaching as telling’ (Bullough, 1992, p. 242) or
‘teaching as transmission of knowledge’ (Samuelowicz & Bain, 1992, p. 100).
The octogenarian writer, MacMahon, in his biographical text, (The Master,
1992), describes the social conditions during the first half of the 20th century
which shaped Irish primary teachers’ perceptions of themselves and
circumscribed their role when he says:
It was enjoined upon us by the state to undertake the revival of Irish as a
spoken language, ... and it was also enjoined upon us by the Catholic
Church, which, to put it at its mildest, was powerful at the time, to transfer
from one generation to the next the corpus of Catholic belief ... (p. 89).
Similarly, McCourt, in his celebrated and controversial book, Angela’s Ashes
(1996), helps to flesh out the consequences of this prescriptive overbearing
curriculum agenda from a pupil perspective. In a purple passage, he begins
with a brief description of the teachers, in the all boys school he attended
(Leamy’s National School). He says of the seven teachers: ... they all had straps,
canes, blackthorn sticks. They hit you with the sticks on the shoulders, the
back, the legs, and especially the hands (p. 80). He continues by indicating what
warranted such brutal treatment when he says: they hit you if you’re late, if
you have a leaky nib on your pen, if you laugh, if you talk, and if you don’t
know things’ (p. 80). Significantly, in terms of MacMahon’s insider account
above, McCourt singles out three issues in particular that he clearly considers
noteworthy: language, religion and history. Regarding language he states: ‘they
hit you if you can’t say your name in Irish, if you can’t say the Hail Mary in
Irish, if you can’t ask for the lavatory pass in Irish.’ From a religious
perspective, ‘they hit you if you don’t know why God made the world, if you
don’t know the patron saint of Limerick, if you can’t recite the Apostles’ Creed’
but the oppressive emphasis on facts and recitation is not confined to prayers
and saints for further ‘treatment’ awaits you ‘if you can’t add nineteen to forty-
seven, if you can’t subtract nineteen from forty-seven, if you don’t know the
chief towns and products of the thirty-two counties of Ireland or if you can’t
find Bulgaria on the wall map of the world ... (p.80). Further difficulty arises for
the pupils when it comes to dealing with history for while there may be an
‘official’ view of the subject in post-independent Ireland, individual teacher’s
have a more idiosyncratic interpretation of civil war politics that can also get
you into trouble, where local knowledge derived from ‘listening to the big boys
ahead of you’ becomes part of your survival kit as ‘they can tell you about the
master you have now, about what he likes and what he hates.’ Consequently, it
is necessary to choose wisely and locally your response to major historical
questions, because–’one master will hit you if you don’t know that Eamon
DeValera [former Irish prime minister and President] is the greatest man that

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 IDENTIFYING DOMINANT SHAPING INFLUENCES ON STUDENT TEACHERS’ IDENTITIES

ever lived. Another master will hit you if you don’t know that Michael Collins
was the greatest man that ever lived’ (p. 80)
In such circumstances, daily life in school becomes a kind of living hell
made more Dante-esque by the personal preferences of individual teachers in
their enactment of official curricula. Power, control, passivity, rote memorizing
and obedience are major elements of this teaching as a means of indoctrination
for conformity, for breaking the spirit. As Fallon (1998, p. 32) argues:
‘blundering from ancestral semi-poverty into middle-classness, caught up in the
embourgeiosement of a largely peasant society, Irish people had little firm ground
under their feet and, in many respects, were a typical post-colonial society in
search of new, stable patterns of living.’ The largely peasant primary teachers
shaped and were shaped by the Irish Ireland that the fledgling state wished to
create, they were both its creators, promoters and its prisoners. What, if any,
are the continuities between this 20th century legacy and the lay theories of
contemporary student teachers?
Though the ‘Mistress’ was a reality in many children’s lives, she does not
feature very prominently in literature. Nevertheless, within popular culture she
shared many characteristics in common with her male colleagues though this
may have been due to suppression of her ‘private world’ from her public
sphere while frequently being assigned to do ‘women’s work’ at the junior end
of the school (Grumet, 1988, p. 56). In Excursions in the Real World, Trevor
(1993) gives a vivid account of his teacher who, despite her youth, wore the
mantle of the village school-mistress. He says of Miss Willoughby [1]:
[she] was stern and young, ... she was Methodist and there burnt in her
breast an evangelical spirit which stated that we, her pupils, except for her
chosen few, must somehow be made less wicked than we were. Her
chosen few were angels of a kind, their handwriting blessed, their
compositions a gift from God, I was not among them. ...I vividly recall
Miss Willoughby. Terribly she appears. Severe and beautiful ... ‘Someone
laughed during prayers,’ her stern voice accuses, and you feel at once that
it was you, although you know it wasn’t. V. poor she writes in your
headline book when you’ve done your best to reproduce, four times,
perfectly, Pride goeth before destruction. (1993, p. 7)
Being strict, presenting a stern face, being distant from learners, insisting on
strict adherence to rules, sticking to the letter in relation to prescribed
curriculum content and demanding accuracy without taking the learners’
perspectives into account are very dominant features of the female archetype
of teaching. What resonance do such archetypes have in contemporary lay
theories among student teachers? Fallon (1998, p. 29) frames this question
differently when he asserts that ‘there is a basic difference between being tied
to the past and coming to terms with the past- in other words, understanding it
and learning from it.’ In contemporary Ireland, where there tends to be a
collective amnesia about the past, supplanted by a ‘culture of contentment’
(Galbraith, 1992) that has taken on ‘shallow roots’ (Cuban & Usdan, 2003),

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there tends only to be a continuous present. Consequently, the past may be

reconstituted in an unreconstructed manner, re-formed rather than
transformed. It is necessary, therefore, as a further means of analysis to indicate
the contemporary policy context of teachers and teaching in Irish primary
schools, while from a more theoretical perspective acknowledging also with
Wertsch (2002, p. 18) that:
human action is inherently connected to the cultural, historical, and
institutional contexts in which they occur ... that humans think, speak, and
otherwise act by using the cultural tools ... that are made available by their
particular sociocultural settings.
Describing the contemporary Irish landscape, while indicating also some of the
major ruptures with the past, particularly the archetypal past of teachers
identified above, becomes all the more critical to a more adequate and more
grounded understanding of student teachers’ lay theories, to identify
continuities and change and, by doing so, indicate also the extent to which the
forces of transformation rather than ‘restoration’ are at work (Ball, 1994). The
analysis is both ‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ (Stake & Mabry, 1998) with
potentially important consequences for the content and delivery of teacher
education in a context of ‘life-wide’ learning (European Commission, 1996).

Policy Context and Social Milieu

When an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development visiting
team described the Irish educational system in 1991 as conservative and rooted
in tradition, it could not have anticipated the veritable avalanche of reports and
reform agendas that emanated from the Department of Education and Science
(DES) in the ensuing decade. A revised primary curriculum was introduced
nationally in September 1999, legislation to establish a Teaching Council has
been passed by parliament (2001) and the Council is currently being
established. Initial Teacher Education too has come under scrutiny and a report
on initial teacher education (Primary), Preparing Teachers for the 21st Century,
was published in 2002 (Government of Ireland, 2002). The 1998 Education Act
provides a degree of regulation to the system that has been unprecedented
even in the heyday of a powerful and idiosyncratic inspectorate.[2]
Official reports and policy perspectives do little to alert the uninitiated to
more deep-rooted structures and processes within the system that have a
significant shaping influence on student teachers, experienced practitioners
and, indeed, teacher educators, who are typically former classroom teachers.
The system is small, consisting of a total of 3,200 schools, almost four-fifths of
which have less than eight teachers. Virtually all schools are privately owned
though publicly funded, the vast majority being owned by the Catholic
Church, thus making the system almost entirely denominational. There are
more than thirty multi-denominational primary schools and this number has
undergone phenomenal growth in recent times thus providing evidence of a

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changed and changing Ireland. During the past twenty years, with increasing
prosperity, industrialization and urbanization, there has been a burgeoning in
the number of Irish medium primary schools; currently there are more than
140, while two Muslim schools are a further indication of increasing ethnic and
cultural diversity.
At a macro-sociocultural level, the pace and extent of change has been
unprecedented. In Ireland Unbound (Corcoran & Peillon, 2002), Peillon argues
that: ‘in the contemporary world, it would be difficult to find an example of
such deep, intense and rapid transformation as has occurred in Ireland’ (p. 1).
He argues that Irish society appears to have skipped a developmental stage;
that from a pre-industrial order it has ‘managed to establish itself as a post-
industrial enclave within global capitalism’ and, he adds, with an apparent mix
of amazement and alarm, that ‘despite the speed and the structural violence of
such a process, this transformation has taken place without major social
upheaval’ (p. 1). Something of the challenge to student teachers’ lay theories
may be gleaned from the following in terms of the Ireland that has rather
recently been left behind. O’ Carroll, for example, asserts:
The seminaries and novitiates were the growth industries of the times and
the volunteers for the foreign missions reached unimaginable proportions.
Instead of considering measures to reverse the processes that marginalized
large sections of society, the establishment struggled incessantly to ward
off the forces of change. (2002, p. 38)
One of the many consequences of the rapidly changing socio-economic and
sociocultural landscape is a conflation between what Hargreaves (2003)
describes as the knowledge economy and the knowledge society, where the
latter is subsumed into and deemed coterminous with the latter to the
detriment of the common good, civil society or shared commitment to Bildung.
O’ Carroll captures this economic/ social implosion in the following terms
with reference to contemporary Ireland. He says:
The current ideology, banal though it may be, conflates society with
nation and economy, and fails to identify and discriminate between the
nature and appropriate functions of community, public sphere and the
state. Society itself has been largely neglected. (O’Carroll, 2002, p. 148)
What are the consequences for student teachers’ lay theories when compared
with the teaching archetypes that were firmly rooted in this earlier and,
apparently, radically different Ireland. This article seeks to find both ruptures
and continuities with these cultural streams in a preliminary analysis of recently
generated data. The intention is to create some initial ‘grounded theory’
(Glaser & Strauss, 1967), to establish a firm foothold in the data as a means of
indicating conjucture and disjuncture in students’ lay theories.

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Data Generation and Initial Analysis

Eighteen interviews of approximately one hour duration were conducted with
a purposive sample of student teachers drawn from the 2003-2004 cohort of 180
who were admitted to the 18 months Postgraduate Diploma in Education
(Primary) in my institution. Criteria used in the selection of participants
include: age, gender, social geography, and the nature of degree already
earned. Towards this end, a short questionnaire was administered to the entire
cohort, 160 responded, and the vast majority indicated a willingness to
participate.
The interview schedule was semi-structured and open-ended. Questions
were derived from a number of sources–previous attempts to construct student
teachers’ lay theories, in the setting, awareness of the manner in which society
and schooling have changed in more than a decade, and with some reference to
an appropriate literature also, while the primary focus was biographical and
their ‘apprenticeship of observation’ in schools (Lortie, 1975), as well as life
history methods (Goodson & Sikes, 2001). The timing of the interviews was
important. This cohort of students began the postgraduate diploma
programme at the beginning of February 2003. In terms of the focus of the
study, we thought it important to interview the participants before they got
too much into the programme, thus polluting and confounding their lay
theories. All of the interviews were conducted and recorded before Easter
(April); they were subsequently transcribed. This article then is a preliminary
‘dance with the data’ (Bagley & Canciennce, 2002).
Data analysis was done as a collective and individual exercise. An
individual transcript was chosen at random and each element of data was
categorised, with the possibility that some data segments could be located in
more than one category. When satisfied that we were categorising data
similarly, though we did not assign particular ‘rules’ to this process (see
Maykhut and Morehouse, 1994), each of six members of the research team
analysed 3 transcripts; data were collated under three broad themes, and there
were several team meetings that continued the process of refining ‘cultural
themes’ (Spradley, 1979, 1980) as well as connecting theoretical perspectives
with our data as part of the initial process of theory building.
In the limited space available in this article, the overarching organising
focus is on continuity and change in the construction of lay theories as well as
their resonance and dissonance with teaching archetypes. This major theme is
connected systematically with three ‘cultural’ pillars of teaching archetypes–
language, religion and history. The extent to which student teachers indicate
the shaping influences of these cultural totem poles on their lay theories are
critically analysed. Although each ‘cultural theme’ is scrutinised individually,
the analysis is intended to be cumulative.

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Theme One
Teaching archetypes, language and student teachers’ lay theories: continuity
and change
As already indicated, in post-independent Ireland, learning the language
was axiomatic, regarded as synonymous with being Irish; it continues to be
compulsory in schools, a requirement for matriculation in five of the seven
universities, and an honours grade is essential for entry to primary teaching.
The curricular commitment must be understood and interpreted within its
wider context where, by 1925, ‘a knowledge of Irish became a requirement for
those entering the general grades in the public service’ but ‘very little pressure
was exerted on those already in the service to become proficient in Irish’
(Ó Riagáin, 1997, p. 19). In such circumstances, the primary school system as
well as primary teachers became both the custodians of the language as well as
those charged with its revival. One of my informants spoke of her experience
of doing supply teaching in a fourth grade and her comments suggest that
‘ritual performance’ (McLaren, 1993) rather than real engagement or
immersion appear to have replaced the repressive fervour of the past. She says:
They are kind of more open now. Just from being in a class and the highest
class that I have taught is fourth, they are pretty open with their Irish. Now
they don’t do a lot of talking in Irish this particular class I had but it wasn’t
so much that this has to be learned. They see it as a language. (CS1)
In a more pluralist and multi-cultural Ireland, however, another informant
suggests that this kind of cultural fundamentalism has no place, particularly in
urban settings where recent refugees and asylum seekers have been ghettoised.
Ben states:
I don’t think there should be as much emphasis on Irish as there is. To be
honest, things have changed an awful lot in the country. It’s bizarre to
expect a Romanian child to learn Irish. It should still be compulsory in
primary school but it should be optional come secondary school because
there are more useful things. It should be a choice for an awful lot of
people. (MF1).
His views contain some ambivalence: he is in favour of compulsion, but with
more flexibility, thus there is both continuity and change, some distancing
based on experience of the realities in an inner city schools. He says:
Let’s say in [names school] they [teachers] are grateful for the kids to be
able to read in English so they don’t put any emphasis on Irish at all. Well
not a huge amount anyway. So I suppose it really just depends on the
school and the area and things like that. (MF1).
He is critical also of teacher educators who have a vested interest in
perpetuating more archetypal attitudes to the Irish language when, as he sees
it, the sociocultural context has altered radically.

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Even in here [in college], some of the stuff that we are doing. It is pretty
much a filler in. The history of the Irish language it’s great, it’s interesting,
it’s the one Irish lecture that we have that’s partly through English. So I
love it. It’s not necessary for us to know to be able to teach Irish. I feel like
it’s a bit of filler in type of thing. There is an awful lot of emphasis on the
Irish. (MF1)
These comments suggest that there is a growing lack of commitment to
engagement with the language in schools generally, but more so in particular
school contexts, while, there is a tendency to cling to ritual performance and
for teacher educators, who have a particular vested interest in the language to
seek to perpetuate outmoded versions of being Irish. This initial evidence
suggests a considerable shift from blind faith in the initial project of language
revival. In a curriculum context where there are far more demands on pupils’
and teachers’ time, re-evaluation of this element of teaching archetypes is
overdue. There is evident ambivalence that seeks to balance the need for
cultural continuity with the necessity to create more cosmopolitan identities
that are inclusive rather than exclusive. Further ambivalence and ambiguity is
evident also when it comes to dealing with religious teaching, orthodoxy and
observance.

Teaching Archetypes, Religion and Student Teachers’

Lay Theories: continuity and change
While the vast majority of primary schools in Ireland are owned by the
Catholic diocese in which they are located, and their individual management
boards are, in many instances, chaired by a local member of the clergy,
religious observance, as measured by weekly church attendance has declined to
approximately 60% nationally, while this figure is less than 10% in many urban
contexts. Despite this changed and changing circumstance, teachers in all of
these schools are obliged by their contracts and by recent legislation (Education
Act, 1998) to provide denominational religious instruction on a daily basis.
Additionally, recent refugees for the most part, many of whom are Muslim
attend these schools. In response to a question regarding the teaching of
religion, Marie begins with the rather ironic exclamation: ‘God, its hard to
know’ and continues:
There are so many children now whose families don’t go to mass at all. I
don’t think what the school says because of television, video games and the
parents, that there are so many other factors outside of school that are
stronger than the school environment itself. So they would outweigh any
effects of religion in school. It’s not as strong as it used to be. (CS3, p. 8)
Her comment suggests that neither religious observance nor commitment to
the teaching of religion is as ‘strong’ as it was in the past. Neville concurs with
this and reinforces the view that in a more multi-cultural context, it is necessary
to relax more overbearing denominational tendencies. He says:

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By necessity I think it is more heterogenous because you have different

nationalities in your class. You have different cultures, people travel more
and have lived abroad. You have the internet you have so much more
information coming from outside. A textbook is not the core or a bible it’s
a guidance. ... But I think the clergy are mellowing and have by necessity.
They are giving more leeway to principals and the boards of management.
My own experience is that they wouldn’t have their stamp as much on the
school as they would have had in previous generations. (CS2, p. 18)
While Neville may be incorrect when he asserts that the clergy are giving more
leeway to principals and teachers, he is pointing to a growing secularising
tendency that reflects his own more a la carte perspective on religion that is
more selective. His church attendance is determined to a significant extent by
whether or not ‘I find a nice priest’ but if he cannot find a ‘nice priest’ ‘I won’t
go’ (CS2, p. 18). However, he readily acknowledges also that he would
consider himself to be ‘mainstream’ where religion is concerned and that, as a
generation, he and his peer group ‘haven’t turned our back to it’. Maggie
makes similar reference to a changing context. While she avers that there will
be continuity in schools due to the ongoing use of religious ritual, that it will
have a more ceremonial role and ‘ritual performance’ rather than challenging
individual’s belief systems in any fundamental way. She says:
There will always be masses in school. Prayers are said morning and
evening. So there is still relevance for that even though a lot of the kids
mightn’t go to mass they are still interested in religion in their own way. It
has died out though. I think a good bit since I was in school where it was
assumed on Monday morning that you knew what the gospel was about
on Sunday. You couldn’t go asking that now I think. So that has changed a
good bit. (MF2)
Her views suggest that in a more secular society to avoid embarrassment and
possible conflict, issues of personal belief systems and practice will be avoided
rather than surfaced. While this may well create a ‘zone of tolerance’ (Oakes et
al, 1998) it does nothing for moral formation if issues about beliefs and values
are to be avoided in the interest of saving face. Another informant’s comments
are illustrative of the transcripts more generally when she says that ‘the Roman
Catholic thing has changed’ (DC3). Consequently, ritual performance rather
than personal conviction is all that is required to stay within the role
requirements. She says:
Definitely when I was in school everybody was very catholic. Everyone
went to mass. And now that’s not really much of an issue once you are
willing to teach and be enthusiastic about religion regardless of what your
beliefs are. If you had a real problem with religion maybe you could focus
on the infant classes because it’s basically ecumenical. It is basic principles
of life, to help people, be good people. I don’t think there are too many
atheists out there. I think people just don’t know where they are going but
they have their own sense of spirituality. I think a lot of teachers will have

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their own perception on their own spirituality. So it is applicable. So you

could teach the infant classes. Even the Muslims are quite happy with their
children being taught. (DC3).
There is anecdotal evidence indicating that Muslims are not ‘quite happy’.
Embedded in the views expressed is a strong conviction that teachers should
not be singled out as being different than the rest of society; that they too are
part of the current malaise and must be allowed to come to terms with their
own versions of spirituality. These comments as a ‘voice type’ reflect a
significant distancing from the certainties and security evident in the world
described by MacMahon (1992). This distancing creates spaces and
opportunities for greater tolerance and difference. However, this does not
appear to require confronting one’s own beliefs and value systems and this may
create a rudderless society that falls prey to the ‘knowledge economy’ without
any real commitment to the ‘knowledge society’ (Hargreaves, 2003). Tolerance
can very quickly become indifference and a survival of the fittest rather than
any (shared) commitment to social cohesion or the common good. However,
creating a zone of tolerance may be an important first step, but it may be
evidence also of a decline in ‘social capital’ (Putnam, 2000), as well as ‘corrosion
of character’ (Sennett, 1998) where moral formation is abandoned to the
influence of ‘the market’. Further distancing as well as some continuity is
evident when the shaping influence of history is considered.

Teaching Archetypes, History and Student Teachers’

Lay Theories: continuity and change
Approximately three decades ago, in the early days of conflict in Northern
Ireland, a prominent Irish politician accused the primary education system in
the south of producing ‘little IRA men’ due, he argued, to the presentation of a
very one-dimensional version of our history. In reference to the first half of the
twentieth century Fallon summarises it in the following terms: ‘an unbalanced
hatred of England and things English’ that produced ‘a myopic and distorted
viewpoint as well as driving Ireland further into isolation (Fallon, 1998, p. 25).
Such cultural myopia and isolationism may no longer be possible or tenable,
while the certainties and securities that accompanied nineteenth century
nationalism have been steadily eroded to give way to more cosmopolitan
identities. In such circumstances, it is important to understand how student
teachers construct their lay theories and distance themselves from teaching
archetypes in such a changed and changing milieu.
Maria indicates that interpretations of history changed during her own
schooling as one generation of teachers was replaced by another. She says:
We knew all the Irish songs and for history I don’t think we learned
anything except about the Black and Tans and the 1916 Rising. Whereas
the principal that’s in the national school now taught me in sixth class, he
was a new teacher that came in. He would have taught us well not rebel

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songs but songs that would make us appreciate our mother country. I’m
sure there is a strong tendency to nationalism still, not that I think it’s a
good thing or a bad thing. But I think that it is important for children to be
aware of where they come from and what their ancestors went through.
(CS3, p. 8)
Maria recognises the importance and significance of having a sense of history as
part of a shaping influence, a sense of place and continuity, but without the
fundamentalist myopia of yesteryear. This too creates a sense of tolerance and
openness to alternative interpretations of the past as well as indicating
pathways towards more cosmopolitan identities that are more forward than
backward looking. Neville, who has a particular commitment to the Irish
language that is rooted in biography, detects a new mood abroad where his
generation are beginning to look back rather than to ignore the past and, in the
process, to begin to take a more active hand in constructing a future.
Paradoxically, he suggests that the recent phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger is
pressing individuals to engage in more strategic thinking about the kind of
society we wish to create. He reports on an overheard conversation between a
well know academic and his peers in his former university. He says:
They were speaking of this whole idea of citizenship. The Celtic tiger
people have made it and morals and citizenship were gone until the Celtic
tiger burst. And people are ... looking back towards where they came from.
You know ‘what am I’ or ‘do I really want to be living in Dublin or inner-
city Cork for the rest of my life?’ ‘Is this what I want?’ Paying big
mortgages, raising kids, getting up for work at six and getting home at ten
every night. Is this Ireland? Have we made it? So a lot of people are looking
back. When we were young people we’re going up to Dublin and we like
‘get out, get out’. (CS2, p. 18)
While part of Neville’s comments refers to lifestyle, there is a deeper
questioning also of what it means to be Irish, and citizenship. This questioning
of things as a new aspect of student teachers’ lay theories may be extremely
valuable and in need of nurturing, particularly in a context where essentialism
and anti-intellectualism tended to be privileged more than inquiry (Fitzgerald,
1991; Lynch & Lodge, 2002; Gleeson, 2004; Sugrue, 2004) and these
characteristics have been attributed also to primary teachers in particular
(Brown, 1985; Carlson, 1990). There is consistent evidence also across the
transcripts of interviewees seeking to put some distance between them and the
past, particularly more archetypal aspects of the past such as corporal
punishment and oppression. When asked to identity aspects of schooling that
they thought had changed, it is remarkable the number of individuals who
cited their parents in response to the question as a kind of collective or voice
type. In MacIntyre’s (1984) terms, they are calling on a ‘stock of stories’ by way
of response. Nora recounts the views of her parents:
They used even say to us when we were in primary school ‘oh it’s so
different’ or when mam would be buying our books she’d be flicking

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through books and she’d say, ‘oh it’s lovely, it’s so different. You don’t
know how lucky you are’. It has definitely changed. And I think it’s even
changed again since I was at primary school. (MF3)
Another informant is even clearer that the archetypal teachers, who seemed to
have been there forever, have all be swept away! She says:
Even since I was in school, we had a lot of teachers, well I didn’t have all of
them but I know my sisters did. I don’t think they went to college. They
had been there for forty years. They would have been old school. It has
completely changed since my parents were in school. I was even looking
back on copy books that my husband had, his Mum had kept them. Even
the books have completely changed, the style. ... There was a few teachers
in our school and I think now you would find that it [their behaviour]
wouldn’t be tolerated you know. That’s changed. My Dad would tell me
how he’d be beaten in front of the class and you wouldn’t say a word back
to your teacher, you wouldn’t open your mouth. Pedagogy of the
oppressed. (DC1)
While the colour in textbooks may be much improved consistent with
technological developments combined with the skills of graphic artists, there is
evidence also that attitudes towards children and childhood have altered
significantly, beyond surface and superficial change (Fullan, 1991). While
distancing oneself from past archetypes may be an important first step in
reconstructing lay theories of teaching, teacher educators, cooperating schools
and teachers must actively assist the process rather than being left to
happenstance. Otherwise, the grammar of schooling is likely to remain
persistent and, perhaps also, even less permeable to change. Dominant
‘cultures of teaching’ may become more easily perpetuated (Hargreaves, 1992,
1994).

Implications for Initial Teacher Education

and Professional Development
As a general pattern in the developed world, initial teacher education has
become much more prescriptive in recent years with an increasing emphasis on
competencies and skills. What this article reveals more than anything else is
that teacher education is about much more than competence. It is about
values, beliefs and attitudes that contribute to the general climate and stance
towards teaching and learning. Giddens (1991) asserts that risk and imagination
are a necessity when individuals and systems are attempting to take leave of the
past. In the fast-paced world of today, being on ‘automatic pilot’ is no longer an
adequate response. When addressing the issue of educational leadership,
MacBeath (1998) concurs with this view when he asserts that the heresies of
today become the orthodoxies of tomorrow. Teaching archetypes were once
accepted orthodoxies, and it is necessary to interrogate then on an ongoing
basis as a means of re-constructing and re-imagining lay theories of teaching

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more appropriate and more adequate to the vicissitudes of our time. The
cultural themes discussed above provide evidence of a struggle ‘to keep a
particular narrative going’ (Giddens, 1991), where student teachers seek to
develop perspectives on change and continuity by appropriating their parents’
stories of schooling, to both distance themselves from archetypes while seeking
also to maintain and create continuity with the past as a means of imagining a
future in teaching.
In more ‘modern’, stable and predictable times, the disciplines of
education (Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and History) were taught
systematically to student teachers as a means of communicating a ‘knowledge-
base’, and of disrupting the robust lay theories of teaching they had developed
informally during their ‘apprenticeship of observation’; they were intended as
the ‘bunker busters’ of archetypal thinking about teaching and informal
learning from experience as a learner rather than a teacher. Initial teacher
education, and continuing professional learning opportunities need to find new
ways to enable student teachers, beginning and experienced teachers to engage
with tradition in the field, and to create new synergies, challenges and
dissonance between contemporary discourses to avoid individual and collective
amnesia about the evolution of teaching and learning as manifest in school
systems. Teacher educators too, need to engage more overtly and consciously
with this task unless they too are to become ‘cocooned’ by their own rhetoric,
and prescriptive contemporary discourses (Giddens, 1991). Beck (2000a)
identifies one of the key challenges to civil society in a European context in the
following terms:
For many people, especially the young, the argument that we must regain
a sense of community through the old values and hierarchies sounds
cynical, sentimental or morally two-faced. It cannot be stressed often
enough that any attempt to create a new meaning for community and the
public good–and thus to clear a way for the civic soul of European
democracy–must start by recognizing the degree of the diversity,
scepticism and individualism that are inscribed in our times and our culture
(2000a, p. 152).
This is the new frontier on which teaching archetypes and lay theories of
teaching are to be transformed, as they are interrogated in their own terms as
well as through the lens of propositional knowledge. This represents a
considerable challenge also to dominant policy orthodoxies about teacher
education. From a research perspective, further evidence is necessary as to how
this challenge is faced or ignored by teacher educators as part of their
engagement and encounters with student teachers. This challenges traditions in
teacher education also and requires a significant shift from expert to learner,
where ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) become more orthodox
provision so that teacher educators and student teachers continue their
‘apprenticeship’ of learning while engaging with and continuing to interrogate
traditions within the field of education. This is likely to be the basis of an

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‘emerging’ or ‘new’ (postmodern) professionalism in teaching (Hargreaves &

Goodson, 1996).

Notes
[1] One of the more fascinating aspects of this account is that it has led to
correspondence between Trevor and Willoughby. She has suggested to him
that she was oblivious to the fact that he perceived her in such a negative light.
However, this reinforces the deep-seatedness of Lay theories and cultural
stereotypes and their unconscious reproduction by generations of teachers. (I
am grateful to Clíona Uí Thuama for making me aware of this correspondence.
By coincidence, as this paper was being prepared for publication, May 2004,
Clíona also informed me that very recently Ms Willoughby passed away at the
ripe old age of ninety-three).
[2] The Education Act 1998 is the second piece of educational legislation to be
enacted since the foundation of the State in 1922. Consequently, the system has
been run on tradition, practice and precedent as well as ministerial circular.
The act therefore is a significant landmark in the legal regulation of the system,
and provides important leverage previously absent in the context of reform
measures.

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CIARAN SUGRUE is Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Studies in

Education at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University. He has worked in
teacher education for 20 years, and his research interests include: qualitative
research methods, continuing professional development of teachers, school
leadership and organisational change, as well as teacher education reform. He

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 Ciaran Sugrue

is General Editor of Irish Educational Studies, and serves on the editorial boards
of a number of international journals. His most recent publications include two
edited texts: Curriculum and Ideology: Irish experiences, international perspectives
(The Liffey Press) and Passionate Principalship: learning from life histories of school
leaders (RoutledgeFalmer, 2005). Correspondence: Ciaran Sugrue, St Patrick’s
College, Dublin City University, Drumcondra, Dublin 9, Republic of Ireland
(ciaran@spd.dcu.ie).

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