Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience

A socio-cultural and critical guide to action

Bruce Johnson, Barry Down, Rosie Le Cornu, Judy Peters, Anna Sullivan, Jane Pearce, Janet Hunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317595823
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

In Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience the stories of 60 graduate teachers are documented as they grapple with some of the most persistent and protracted personal and professional struggles facing teachers today. Narratives emerge detailing feelings of frustration, disillusionment and even outrage as they struggle with the complexity, intensity and immediacy of life in schools. Other stories also surface to show exhilarating experiences, documenting the wonder, joy and excitement of working with young people for the first time.

This book makes sense of these experiences in ways that can assist education systems, schools, and faculties of teacher education, as well as early career teachers themselves to develop more powerful forms of critical teacher resilience. Rejecting psychological explanations of teacher resilience, it endorses an alternative socio-cultural and critical approach to understanding teacher resilience. The book crosses physical borders and represents experiences of teachers in similar circumstances across the globe, providing researchers and teachers with real-life examples of resilience promoting policies and practices.

This book is not written as an account of the failures of an education system, but rather as a provocation to help generate ideas, policies and practices capable of illuminating the experiences of early career teachers in more critical and socially just ways at an international and national level.

1
Introduction

What this book is about

There have been lots of things I’ve taken personally and I’ve been able to reflect on those and change them. But there have been other things that I need to learn in my own head that no matter what I do they won’t change. So yeah, I’ve got to separate myself from them and decide what I can change and what I can’t.

Natalie

I just love being in the classroom with kids.

Sophie

Writing a book about the experiences of early career teachers like Natalie and Sophie presents both enormous challenges and new possibilities. As outsiders looking in, we have been privileged to listen to the stories of 60 Australian early career teachers as they grapple with some of the most persistent and protracted personal and professional struggles facing teachers today. At times this has been an exhilarating experience as we documented the wonder, joy and excitement of teachers working with young children for the first time. We always found these conversations to be thought-provoking and we certainly came away with a renewed appreciation of the complexity of teaching and the commitment and dedication required by novice teachers as they seek to make sense of their chosen profession in circumstances not always of their own choosing. All too often, however, we heard demoralising stories about their feelings of frustration, disillusionment and even outrage as they struggled with the intensity and immediacy of school life. Jonathan Kozol (2007) in his beautifully crafted Letters to a young teacher named Francesca, articulates better than most some of the contradictions and dilemmas facing new teachers:

The truth is that in all the documents I read … from the various state capitals, or from the multitude of government-supported institutes where goals are set and benchmarks for performance of our students are spelled out in what is painstaking detail, I never come on words such as ‘delight’ or ‘joy’ or ‘curiosity’ or, for that matter, ‘kindness,’ ‘empathy,’ ‘compassion for another child.’ Nothing, in short, that would probably come first for almost any teacher working with young children.

Kozol, 2007, p. 100

The intent of this book is to illuminate how early career teachers make sense of teaching in contexts over which they have limited, if any, control. As McNeil expresses it, ‘The language of control has become the language of education reform’ (1986, p. xvii). Teachers’ work is now being ‘over determined and over regulated’ through a range of managerial devices including ‘the imposition of a national curriculum and national testing and interventions into pedagogical decision-making’ (Ball, 1993, p. 106). These unwarranted intrusions, as we shall see throughout this book, have profound effects on beginning teachers’ identities and subjectivities.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage ‘the medium is the message’, Postman and Weingartner describe how schools shape:

[T]he perceptions … attitudes … and sensitivities you are allowed to develop – almost all of the things you learn to see and feel and value. You learn them because your environment is organized in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that you learn them.

1969, p. 29

Herein lies the central dilemma of early career teachers like Natalie as they attempt to navigate their own teacher identities against the seemingly intractable obstacles and interferences they feel powerless to change. For others, like Sophie, the love of working with children helps to maintain their sense of optimism and hope against the odds. In this book we describe this as socio-cultural, critical teacher resilience or the capacity to resist the damaging effects of wider social, economic and political forces impinging on the nature of teachers’ work. We shall have more to say about this shortly. Thus, this persistent struggle between teacher control and agency provides us with a framework for rethinking the experiences of early career teachers as they endeavour to negotiate their own personal and pedagogical biographies within the context of the historical, institutional and cultural arrangements of the normal(ising) school.

Based on these experiences we seek to develop an alternative socio-cultural, critical orientation to teacher resilience, by which we mean a willingness to analyse individual biographies in relation to key social, institutional and structural arrangements (Mills, 1971). Only then, we argue, is it possible to move beyond the limitations of pathologising and victim-blaming approaches to teacher resilience (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of these approaches). On this basis, we set out to identify and explain some of the ways in which governments, education systems, schools, universities and early career teachers themselves might develop alternative forms of action. The book acknowledges that the substantial level of change required – cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational – to improve early career teacher resilience demands a great deal of cooperation and support from governments, education systems, schools, universities and communities; early career teachers cannot do it alone. Generating a broader set of conversations about the kinds of conditions required to promote early career teacher resilience and wellbeing is the primary purpose of this book.

Why is it important?

The research on which this book is based commenced in 2008 at a time when Australia was experiencing severe teacher shortages. Education systems, policy makers and politicians alike were becoming increasingly alarmed by the escalating attrition rate among early career teachers and the exodus of qualified teachers leaving the profession (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Vocational Training, 2007). This book is, therefore, not only a response to the pressing and cyclical nature of teacher shortages but, more broadly, an attempt, first, to understand what is happening to the nature of teachers’ work at the beginning of the twenty-first century; second, to explain why so many teachers are choosing to leave the profession in the first five years of teaching; and finally, to consider what can be done in terms of a critical guide to action. By foregrounding the experiences of beginning teachers, this book attempts to generate a rich set of narratives, largely from an ‘insider’s’ point of view, to help us better understand the reasons why new teachers choose to stay or leave the profession. We hope this book is not read as another text of despair (Fine & Weiss, 1998) about the troubles of early career teachers but rather a provocation to help generate ideas, policies and practices capable of illuminating the experiences of these teachers in more critical and socially just ways. By drawing on the narrative stories of inexperienced teachers we want to interrupt the way things are and, at the same time, create an alternative conception and practice around teacher resilience based on the principles and values of teacher empowerment, participatory democracy and social justice. Only then, we argue, is it possible to create and more widely sustain the kinds of conditions conducive to developing a politically, ethically and pedagogically engaged conception of teacher resilience in these ‘dark times’ (Arendt, 1968; Benhabib, 2010).

We believe Arendt’s metaphor of dark times is especially useful because it helps us to illuminate how the realities of teachers’ daily lives ‘are hidden in plain sight’ through the ‘public invisibility of inconvenient facts’ (Berkowitz, 2010, pp. 3–4). Drawing on Arendt, Berkowitz (2010) argues that what is required in dark times is ‘thoughtfulness … the honest work of thoughtful comprehension’ because it can act as a bulwark against totalitarian and bureaucratic tendencies in society or ‘thoughtlessness’ (Berkowitz, 2010, p. 5). Berkowitz explains:

What is needed in dark times, Arendt shows us, are people who think and who, in thinking, make for themselves the space to judge. Instead of reason, Arendt teaches the supreme importance of thinking – the habit of erecting obstacles to oversimplifications, compromises, and conventions.

2010, p. 8

These ideas are profoundly important as we delve into the lives of early career teachers, who are increasingly viewed as mere ‘deliverers’, ‘testers’ and ‘technicians’ of pre-packaged knowledge, skills and values determined by official policy mandates and external experts (Ball, 1993, p. 107). Neo-liberal ideologies and policies (e.g. centralised mandates, standardisation, accountability, performativity, managerialism, testing, benchmarks, school choice, ranking and privatisation) demand a new kind of ‘preferred teacher … one who conforms to the new marketised, customer-orientated teacher able to demonstrate government policy through the satisfaction of pre-determined criterial indicators of performance’ (Smyth & Shacklock, 1998, p. 8). Putting it another way, there is an increasing separation of conception from execution, or what Braverman (1998) describes as the ‘degradation’ or ‘deskilling’ of labour, as instrumental ideologies hold sway over teacher preparation and classroom pedagogy (Giroux, 1988, p. 123).

In this context, we are in agreement with Maxine Greene when she argues that we have a choice ‘to see the world small or to see it big’ (1995, p. 10). As Greene explains it, to see things small ‘one chooses to see from a detached point of view, to watch behaviours from the perspective of a system … a vantage point of power or existing ideologies – taking a primarily technical point of view’ (1995, pp. 10– 11). This leads to a preoccupation with technical matters or means–ends thinking that ‘screens out the faces and gestures of individuals, of actual living persons’ (p. 11). On the other hand, to see things big ‘one must resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead’ (p. 10). This more enlightened view of education allows us to see things ‘from the point of view of the participant in the midst of what is happening … to be privy to the plans people make, the initiatives they take, the uncertainties they face’ (p. 10). In the case of early career teachers, we argue that there is an urgent need to ‘see things big’ in order to better understand how these teachers negotiate the damaging effects of political, managerial and technical interventions on their emotional and professional labour and the implications for building a more humanising teacher resilience. In pursuing this agenda, we take on board Greene’s advice to make the themes of ‘transformations, openings, [and] possibilities’ more ‘audible’ in our conversations (1995, p. 17).

What kind of research informs this book?

We position this book within the critical tradition of social research. That is to say, we believe in research that is capable of challenging the way things are by questioning the everyday beliefs, habits, routines and practices that serve to maintain it that way. In particular we draw on the idea of ‘critical advocacy research’ (Shields, 2012) and its role in producing ‘research that is both rigorous and activist, that has the potential to inform both policy and practice and at the same time, to empower both researcher and participants’ (2012, pp. 2–3). In terms of understanding the experiences of early career teachers, we believe this approach is extremely timely and relevant because it sets out ‘to raise consciousness, to develop understanding, to urge reflection, and to advocate redress’ (2012, p. 5). In short, in this book we attempt to produce knowledge that is directly relevant, useful and capable of making a difference to the lives of newly appointed teachers. To this end, the kinds of questions we explore in this book include:

• How can we ‘critically’ reinvigorate mainstream approaches to ‘human resilience’?
• What kinds of theoretical ideas are helpful in this task?
• What do early career teachers have to say about their work?
• How do beginning teachers make sense of the complexity of teaching?
• What strategies do they employ to address adverse circumstances?
• How do educational systems and schools respond to newly appointed teachers?
• What specific policies, practices and resources make a difference?
• How might research be mobilised intellectually, politically and strategically to assist early career teachers?

In searching for answers to these kinds of questions we draw on the methodology of critical ethnography. Critical ethnography, in the words of Madison, ‘takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control’ (2005, p. 5). This approach to knowledge production is neither impartial nor apolitical but seeks to ‘challenge institutions, regimes of knowledge, and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities’ (p. 5). We do this in two ways. First, by listening to the voices of early career teachers through a series of purposeful conversations (Burgess, 1998) and second, by producing narrative portraits (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to help us understand the mundane practices and institutional arrangements that either enable or constrain early career teacher resilience. Our intent is, therefore, to get up close to the daily lives of new teachers in order to reveal ‘the complexities of social practice’ (Lave, 2011, p. 61) for the purpose of challenging conventional wisdom associated with psychological and self-help approaches to teacher resilience and creating a more robust form of socio-cultural, critical teacher resilience.

The empirical research informing this book involved a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1998) including 60 primary and secondary school early career teachers spread across two Australian states: Western Australia (WA) and South Australia (SA). The teachers were drawn from a range of schools including Catholic, public and independent private schools located in a mix of metropolitan, regional and remote area locations. During the first phase of the project we conducted 60 semi-structured interviews in terms 2 and 3 of the 2009 school year with a follow-up interview in term 4. In the second round of interviews we also interviewed 51 school leaders, a total of 171 interviews of approximately 30–60 minutes’ duration. These interviews were transcribed to produce over 1,800 pages of interview data. The research team analysed these data at two workshops held over five days, where we identified five emergent themes: relationships, school culture, teacher identity, teachers’ work, and policies and practices. Further, we used NVivo software to create a more fine-grained coding of categories within each of the five dominant themes to produce a Draft profile of conditions supporting early career teacher resilience.

In the second phase, we trialled the draft profile in nine schools – five in WA and four in SA – to check out its veracity for the purpose of confirmation and/or modification in the light of experience. Early career teache...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Critically reconceptualising early career teacher resilience
• 3 Participatory policy work
• 4 Reframing the nature of early career teachers’ work
• 5 Reshaping school cultures for democracy and empowerment
• 6 When the personal is political: Contradictions and paradoxes in the relational work of early career teachers
• 7 Agent for change or problem child? The struggle for a satisfying identity in the early years of teaching
• 8 The personal, professional and political challenges involved in mobilising knowledge about early career teacher resilience
• 9 Conclusion
• Index