This essay explores the roots and implications of stance, which helps examine the daily practice of educating new teachers. Stance is about the positioning involved in teaching. It depends on a postmodern view of reality as being situational and interpreted, rather than fixed and predefined. In literacy education, a reader's relationship to text is either efferent (to gain information) or aesthetic (to have a lived-through experience). When readers assume one of the positions in relationship to a text, only certain meanings are possible, while others are rendered invisible. This is the essential notion behind stance. There are multiple positions possible in any context, but none can expose everything. Teachers assign students a position relative to themselves when they assume a stance. When teachers take a stance, it aims at shaping, anticipating, meeting, and changing a student's self-perception. One teacher educator had undergraduate students write about their stance. There were several common themes in their stances (e.g., making school connect with life and a sense of themselves as learners). When the students took their stances with them during student teaching, their mentors were unimpressed. The mentor teachers also wrote their stances; they mentioned making connections with families but did not discuss the importance of school overlapping with life. Stance can help teacher educators and students understand that the paradoxes of teaching are worth viewing from many perspectives. (Contains 21 references.) (SM)