Professional Socialization as Embedded Elaborations: Experience,Institutions, and Professional Culture Throughout Teacher Careers

Across a wide range of studies on professional socialization, there is a shared assumption that people carry forward what they learn in formal training experiences and somehow bring it to bear on the subsequent organizational settings they enter. Yet we actually know very little about whether, and exactly how, people carry forward the meanings they develop as part of their professional socialization experience. We address this gap in the literature by examining professional socialization that unfolds over the teaching career. Combining interview data with public and private school teachers across career stages with ethnographic data of a university‐based teacher education program, we examine how the meanings people develop about their work are shaped concomitantly by accumulated experience and institutional settings. We develop a conceptualization of professional socialization that we call embedded elaborations, which attends to the ways that people's ongoing meaning making (or elaborations) is situated (or embedded) institutionally and temporally. We also show how embedded elaborations act as meaning‐making processes through which people in local settings actively produce and reproduce elements of a wider professional culture.