Recently, researchers and policymakers have begun to question the role of professional education in learning to teach. This inquiry reflects skepticism about the contributions of teacher education, which is, in turn, fueled by popular ideas about the work of teaching: teachers are born not made, or that "real" learning begins once novices arrive in the classroom. Despite its sometimes dubious reputation, teacher education has an undeniable economic value, as legislation demanding highly qualified teachers presses on schools and districts to recruit candidates who are credentialed by the programs in question. But what, exactly, are the contributions of teacher education to teachers' eventual practice? The authors' study takes up the challenge of understanding the role of teacher education in learning to teach by connecting novice teachers' experiences in pre-service education with their eventual practice. Through a longitudinal person-centered ethnography, the authors have been following 8 secondary teachers as they advance through various stages of their education, starting in a progressive, university-based teacher credentialing program, into their student teaching, and, eventually, their induction years in the profession. In this article the authors explain how a conceptual framework of teacher identity helps them understand the variations in interns' learning in the first stages of their formal education. The authors observed the eight participants over their time in the teacher education program (TEP), including their work in courses and in their field placements. In-depth participant interviews accompanied many of the observations, along with interviews with their cooperating teachers, university supervisors, and university instructors. The authors' goal in data collection was to understand the interns' learning from a situative perspective--that is, to understand the complex social organization that shapes learning, including the learners, teachers, curricula, and the social environments in which they come together. To do so, the authors needed to capture the ways in which the TEP constituted learning environments for the interns, as well as their individual ways of interacting with those environments. (Contains 3 notes.)