Search results for: Beginning teachers

This article examines the transition experiences of four early career teachers throughout their first year of teaching. Using metaphorical drawings and narratives, this study investigated the relationship between identity, resilience and agency during this transition period. By drawing on legitimate peripheral participation as a theoretical lens to theorise teachers’ transition experiences, the findings reveal that identity, resilience and agency worked in tandem to enable each early career teacher to look beyond challenges, pressure and fluctuating confidence during this critical transition period. These findings shed new light on why some teachers successfully withstand pressure throughout their first year of teaching.

The article discusses parent–teacher relationships in school micropolitics based on beginning teachers’ stories. The authors employ a narrative approach and investigate how micropolitical conditions and strategies are portrayed in beginning teachers’ stories of parent–teacher relationships. The research material consists of narrative interviews with seven Finnish primary school teachers in the first and second years of their careers. The findings indicate that micropolitical processes play a part in constructing parent–teacher relationships. These micropolitics both enable and limit these relationships and influence how beginning teachers learn to cope with parent relationships. The findings reveal various micropolitical strategies that beginning teachers use to enact and construct parent–teacher relationships. Furthermore, the findings show that parent–teacher relationships do not necessarily include just parents and teachers, but are multidimensional, encompassing several intertwined relationships that micropolitically condition parent–teacher relationships. The implications for pre- and in-service teacher education and school leaders are considered.

Early career teachers are increasingly required to be ‘classroom ready’ upon graduation and to demonstrate capabilities that match their more experienced colleagues. They are also joining a profession that is characterised by increased scrutiny and accountability driven by standards that seek to identify the hallmarks of good teaching. This agenda, constructed around a discourse of ‘quality’, has created dilemmas for early career teachers. However, little is known about how early career teachers navigate these pressures as they begin their careers. This article reports on a study that sought high-achieving graduate teachers’ perceptions of teacher quality and how they assessed their own practices within a ‘quality’ framework. The study found that high-achieving early career teachers wrestle with their perceptions of what a ‘good’ teacher might be and do, and how this contrasts with official representations of a ‘quality teacher’, and that they frequently ‘govern’ themselves using the regulations and discourses related to ‘the quality teacher’. The authors argue that broader conceptualisations of teacher quality are needed to enable early career teachers to develop as agentic professionals.

This article explores the experiences of six nonbinary preservice teachers of diverse gender expression and racial and class backgrounds. Each was enrolled or had recently completed teacher training in North America when the study was conducted in 2018. This qualitative study employed in-depth, phenomenological interviews to prompt participants to reconstruct rich narratives about their experiences as educators. This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “willful subject” to consider how participants negotiated the relationship between their gender identities as non-binary people and their nascent professional identities as teachers. These beginning teachers expressed concern about succeeding in their teacher education programs and worried about how others perceived them because of the expectation of normative gender implicit in teaching’s professional norms. This expectation was enforced by the profession’s gatekeepers more than by K–12 students and their families, who participants generally described as hospitable or indifferent to having a non-binary teacher. If the profession is to genuinely welcome gender diversity, it must do more than protect trans and gender nonconforming teachers from discrimination and harassment: It must also recognize and work to deconstruct its own gender normativity.