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Resilience

Addressing the Teacher Exodus: Enhancing early career teacher resilience and retention in changing times

Re-conceptualising early career teacher resilience – a beginning point for further thinking and theorising

In this project we have adopted a socially critical orientation to teacher resilience to help us move beyond the limitations of overly psychologised and individualistic explanations. At the outset, we would like to declare our preference for an approach to teacher resilience that has the capacity to better understand the everyday ‘realities’ and taken-for-granted power/knowledge arrangements that operate in the contexts in which teachers learn, develop, and sometimes struggle. Our research aims to:
  1. identify the range of challenging circumstances (influenced by socio-cultural and systemic school policies and practices, personal dispositions and life events) that put early career teachers ‘at risk’ of leaving the profession;
  2. better understand the dynamic and complex interplay between individual, relational and contextual conditions that operates over time to promote teacher resilience;
  3. identify specific policies, practices and resources that best promote early career teacher resilience.
In adopting a socially critical orientation to teacher resilience, we have focused on:
  1. the normative components of resilience by exposing the implicit values, beliefs and assumptions that underpin most traditional conceptions of resilience. This has involved problematising three key resilience constructs – ‘risk’, ‘protective factors and processes’, and ‘positive outcomes’ – to identify the ‘mainstream’ values embedded within them and the interests they serve. This theoretical work has practical consequences as it recognises that resilience is a socially constructed concept; that what constitutes ‘risk’ and ‘protection’ depends on judgements about what is considered ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for individual teachers and groups of teachers; and that seemingly self evident truths about ‘thriving’ in the face of adversity can be contested.

    However, we have recognised the danger of slipping into the paralysing void of moral relativism where every statement or viewpoint is deconstructed and rendered powerless on the grounds that it rests on contested norms or assumptions. We have done this by explicitly stating that our research seeks to promote particular educational and social outcomes for early career teachers that involve professional and personal learning and development, and their empowerment as emerging professionals.

    Having made a commitment to these outcomes, one of our earliest challenges will be to engage our participants in serious discussions about their understandings of what constitutes ‘risks’ to their personal and professional wellbeing, and what helps them achieve specific ‘positive outcomes’ in their context, at particular times, and within the set of expectations that they and their colleagues have put in place. This may lead to a consensus view that some practices and experiences are indeed 'bad' and/or 'good' for the wellbeing of many early career teachers. Principles of fairness and justice will be invoked to justify our collective view.
     
  2. identifying, naming and arguing against the hyper-individualisation of the concept of resilience. Most popular discourses about resilience focus on the ‘strength’, ‘courage’, ‘persistence’, and ‘doggedness’ of people (and more recently, football teams, multinational companies, and the stock market) who ‘struggle’ to overcome significant difficulties in their lives but, nevertheless, ‘survive’ the experience. Unfortunately, having such an individualised view of resilience leads to a diminution of the influence of situational and structural forces on human experience. The consequences of this are serious:
    1. it leads to ‘victim-blaming’ as individualised explanations of quite often widespread problems are promoted
    2. it underestimates the impact of social class, race, gender, and disability on human experience
    3. it shifts responsibility for human wellbeing away from the state to the individual
    4. it promotes simplistic, naïve, ahistorical and apolitical conceptions of teacher resilience.
    Because of this, we prefer to use and promote a more contextually sensitive and theoretically robust notion of resilience that acknowledges the influence of broader social, economic and political forces on human experience. We still acknowledge the psychological dimensions of resilience that help to explain some differences in human agency, for example, but resist the extremes of an individualising psychology that implicitly pathologises early career teachers’ problems and contributes to the politics of ‘victim blaming’.
     
  3. introducing new analytic methods, tools and concepts into the field of resilience research from critical ethnography, feminist studies, post-colonial studies, and labour process theory. Because of its preoccupation with the psychology of resilience, we think that the field has missed opportunities to draw on sociological, cultural, and political constructs to better understand teacher resilience. For example, by drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the ‘technologies of regulation’, we are better able to describe and understand how individual teachers are ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ through a combination of subtle mechanisms of power such as ‘hierarchical observation’, and ‘normalising judgements’. This kind of approach allows us to explore, in greater depth, the implications of regimes of performativity (accountability, measurement, technical rationality, managerialism and so forth) for teachers’ work, and its consequences for early career teacher resilience.

    Our principle means of doing this will be through the use of critical ethnography, a research methodology that brings to life the everyday experiences of teachers within a broader socio-political framework.
In summary, our approach:
  • Acknowledges that teacher resilience is a socially constructed category imbued with implicit beliefs, values and assumptions.
  • Challenges traditional pathologising, individualising and victim-blaming explanations of teacher resilience.
  • Recognises the importance of socio-cultural processes of personal-professional identity formation.
  • Examines the operation of power and knowledge in shaping teacher’s lives, identities and subjectivities.
  • Draws on a range of theoretical tools that are capable of both interrupting taken-for-granted explanations of ‘the way things are’ and imagining ‘what might be’.
  • Explores the nature of empowering professional work policies and practices that are capable of enhancing teachers’ agency and wellbeing.