Becoming university supervisors: Constructing practices and identitie

Researchers, both within and outside the field of education, have launched a multitude of studies, collected and analyzed volumes of data, and filled reams of paper in an effort to understand more deeply the complicated and shifting interplay of factors that comprise the world of teaching and learning. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any established educational policy, practice, or role that has not served as the site of significant research attention. Despite a robust corpus of educational research which has focused on the courses and practices involved in teacher education at the university level, one role has remained in the shadows: the university field supervisor.;Through this ethnographically-based qualitative dissertation, I contribute to the small corpus of literature on university-based student teacher supervision by making heard the voices of two graduate students operating within a large, research-oriented university. To examine how two beginning university supervisors negotiated the relationship between what the institution put forward to guide them and the principles objectified by the individuals' personal/professional experiences that they followed in guiding themselves through their first semester of supervision. I developed a two-source (institutional and personal/professional) model that allowed me to analyze the complex interplay of these sources. As a result of that analysis, this dissertation offers an original view of the complicated moves that two individuals made as they individually identified institutional and personal/professional resources in constructing practices and identities for particular situations and how those decisions contributed to the creation of significantly different practices within the context of the same Teacher Education Program.;Further, in presenting the implications of this study to research-oriented, or similar, universities concerned with designing or revising their program of induction or intervention for university supervisors, I constructed a Vision of Supervision model to acknowledge the affordances and constraints offered by elements of a university supervision program that stand in tension with each other. This dissertation concludes with a series of interrogatory explorations that the two beginning university supervisors' experiences suggest to the institutional site of the study and to teacher education writ large.