This study examined influences that preservice literacy teacher education courses and sustained relationships with literacy researchers had on the literacy practices of three preservice teachers during student teaching and their subsequent self-efficacy and performance as literacy teachers during their first teaching years. Data collected during students' literacy methods courses, at their student teaching sites, and early in the first teaching year included: class projects from literacy methods courses; self-evaluations from those courses; interviews; classroom visits during student and beginning teaching; post-visit interviews; focus groups; journals; and research team meeting notes. The research team included four literacy education faculty members. These new teachers faced sources of knowledge that included their pasts as students, their student teaching placement, and what the research team offered them. They began to believe they were smart about their classrooms, and they could increasingly construct curriculum rooted in their students' needs. Their move away from being receivers of teaching knowledge to being constructors of such knowledge was tentative. Their constructing of teaching identities seemed rooted in the collaborative context of sustained relationships with each other and the researchers. Their identities were influenced by the shifting status of others' knowledge, as they learned that the researchers and cooperating teachers did not have the blueprint for teaching knowledge specific to their teaching contexts. (Contains 26 references.) (SM)