Teaching is a complex and challenging craft. Because of this, the endeavor of learning to teach is filled with experiences of doubt. Beginning teachers search for answers to dilemmatic questions: How do I engage and motivate my students? How do I effectively assess my students’ learning? How do I create an equitable classroom? Questions of this nature have no failsafe solutions, and, thus, beginning teachers tend to question their pedagogical habits continually as they adjust and grow as educators. This dissertation is an exploration into the doubt that beginning teachers experience. Adopting a phenomenological methodology and using conversations with beginning teachers as my data, I explore what it is like for beginning teachers to live through moods of doubt. Throughout this dissertation, I will construct two central arguments: First, the mood of doubt is not an exclusively cognitive exercise; rather, the mood of doubt infuses a beginning teacher’s entire lifeworld and affects how the beginning teacher experiences body, space, relation, and time. Second, the mood of doubt is not only instrumental but also existential; that is, as they experience doubt, beginning teachers attempt to solve problems (e.g., How do I motivate my students?), and, at the same time, the mood of doubt can illuminate existential quandaries: What is my future? Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? My dissertation has been designed to evoke, in my readers, a sense of what it might feel like to ask oneself these existential questions.
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