This dissertation presents findings from qualitative research into educational beliefs changes in novice secondary English teachers. Three recent graduates of an urban English Education Master's program reconstructed pedagogies and practices in interviews, and multiple written artifacts were analyzed: application essays; teacher education coursework assignments; student teaching journals. Primary research questions examined: (1) novice secondary English teachers' identification of educational beliefs at three key points: entering a teacher education program; teacher education coursework/fieldwork; the first three years in the profession. (2) relationships between beliefs changes and self-reported experiences at these three points. (3a) pedagogies and practices novice teachers reported enacting in their own classrooms. (3b) novice teachers' beliefs and their fit with current professional contexts. (4) longitudinal impact of a constructivist teacher education program on novice teachers' beliefs and practices.

Aspiring teachers bring to teacher education programs strong preconceived views of education, whether conscious beliefs or not. Educational researchers consider teacher beliefs to be culturally and societally informed. This macro view of education focuses primarily on larger patterns and structures, and presumes a universal nature to tacit educational beliefs. Britzman's (1986, 2003) examinations of “cultural myths” of teaching informing each individual's “institutional biography” of school experiences concentrated primarily on the “mass experience” of schooling which yields common anxieties, myths, and understandings. It is only recently that researchers acknowledge the profoundly subjective, individualistic, emotional qualities of teacher beliefs (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003; Zembylas, 2005). The three teachers profiled distilled their school years into deep understandings of emotional and psychological development in school which activated specific personal dimensions of themselves. They retained their own “personal mythologies” of schooling, visions of school transcending any cultural script about what teachers “do” or what students “ought to know,” focusing instead on high school's unique, specific function in their psychic development. These novice teachers consciously engaged with new ideas and problematized old ideas during the teacher education program, and graduated expressing idealistic intentions (i.e., enacting a constructivist, democratic pedagogy) reflecting modified educational beliefs, but their highly personal pre-service socio-emotional educational beliefs remained central to unique visions of teachers, students, student success, and the purposes of schooling.