What We Found
With the data we gathered, we saw that there were important factors that lined up. Influences from other teachers had a big impact on the participants, with good teachers being models, and bad teachers striving some to become better. There were jobs/internships that helped progress or reveal their desire to teach. One participant read to children and picked up several hours at a preschool. Another got to intern in a 4th grade class. Literacy in these cases literacy somehow shaped their path. The participant who read to children loved reading, they were a total book worm as a kid and enthralled with Harry Potter. In this way, she got to express her love of reading literacy through teaching. With the participant who interned in the 4th grade class, he didn’t have many strong connections with the typical literacies in school, but he knew and loved computers. Because of this, he started attending Sno-Isle, a technical skills center, his junior and senior year in high school to take more hands-on technology classes. One of the requirements his first year was the internship. He chose to go and teach 4th grade class about computers in a way he never got to learn as a child. It was in this way that he got to express a strong literacy love of computers and technology to other students. Through these ties with literacy, they got chances to explore teaching and realize/cement what they wanted to pursue.
The data we got showed varied results. Some of the interviewees knew for years that they wanted to be educators and reached that decision more due to experiences with influential teachers, both good or bad, rather than as a result of meaningful literacy experiences in childhood. One person we interviewed knew she wanted to be a teacher after having a fifth-grade teacher she appreciated. Another took up tutoring for money and became inspired to pursue a job in education upon enjoying it. However, a commonality between different interviewees was a love of or at least an appreciation for reading and writing. Our results did not strictly show whether or not there was a strong link between childhood literacy and pursuing education majors, but they did hint that people who seek careers as educators may have had good childhood literary experiences or events, even if they did not heavily influence them to become teachers. In one interview, though, the interviewee confided that she struggled with writing and preferred musical literacy. The possible flaws or biases in our data would have to lie within our questions. While we feel that our questions were straight-forward and easy to understand, we could have added more detail; however, we decided to leave them more open ended so as to get a wider variety of answers left up to the interviewee’s interpretation.
