This qualitative study focuses on ten graduate students in an English education master's program, who were enrolled in a course that I taught on teaching literature in the secondary school. I had restructured the course to make students the center of a series of conversations. For the study, I drew upon memory theory to examine their imagined roles and how they intersected with course readings and discussions. The research explored three questions: (1) What kinds of imagined teacher roles did these preservice and novice teachers bring into their literature class? (2) How did their imagined roles intersect with what they read about and discussed during the course? and (3) How did their conceptions of their roles and their stances on teaching English change during the course? Data included participants' responses to readings and reflections on their developing roles. The findings show that providing spaces for their conversations--face-to-face, written, and virtual--offered productive venues for learning. In these spaces, they were able to acknowledge, discuss, and critically reflect on their memories and their prior conceptions of teaching with their peers. Through this process, they discovered that relying on memories was insufficient, and they began re-imagining their roles as English teachers. (Contains 1 note.)