Critical Reflection and Early Career Instructor Formation

Mello develops a reflection on what it means to prepare early career instructors for their career in teaching. This chapter proposes to reconceptualize this preparation in terms of formation, juxtaposed to training. Conceptualized as an often unconscious process, training steers the early career learner to neglect reflexivity and critical thinking and become a passive absorber of knowledge. Formation as a process, however, centers the ECI as an agent of their own learning by privileging critical reflection on and engagement with disciplinary knowledge, history, and politics, with the practices of learning-teaching, and the ways they relate. The chapter intertwines non-linear story-telling, learning-through-reflection, and insights for formation. Without offering a step-by-step on formation, the reader is invited to reflect on particular points for grasping formation as a process that cannot be copied or reproduced and one that requires continual renewal to avoid acritical reproduction of older (or new) structures of practice/knowledge.