From Ferrari to Citroneta. Sustaining student teachers’ stories

ABSTRACT ‘Son, the only thing that I want is to tell you is that I need you to be aware that you are getting out of a Ferrari and into a Citroneta.’ This is what David’s father said to him when he left engineering to enter physical education. In his new career, a teacher educator asked him, ‘Why didn’t you study something more difficult?’ David’s intellectual curiosity increased, so three years later, he also started to study pedagogy in philosophy in parallel. When he told another teacher educator that he had begun this new pedagogical program, that teacher said, ‘You will be two times poor!’ We think, write, and rewrite together these stories, analyzing the role of teacher educators in support of teacher education experiences. This research was conducted using the three-dimensional spaces of an autobiographical narrative inquiry. The narrative analysis was a thorough rereading of the final text and conversations between the participant/first author and the second author (teacher educator). Stories lead people to think about sustaining teachers to assist them in experiencing more desirable educational processes. We asked questions about helping teachers to preserve motivation and persistence across the difficulties associated with teaching tasks.