Australian Association For Research In Education International Education Research Conference 2009, Canberra

Symposium: Early Career Teacher Resilience: Preliminary insights from a qualitative study

This symposium addresses some of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen during the first 12 months of a 4 year study of early career resilience. The 4 inter-related papers deal with some of the challenges we have faced designing and implementing the first phase of the study as well as our emerging understandings of the complexity of early career teachers’ lives.

Re-theorising resilience from a socially critical perspective

Bruce Johnson & Barry Down

the normative components of resilience by exposing the implicit values, beliefs and assumptions that underpin most traditional conceptions of resilience. This involved problematising three key resilience constructs – ‘risk’, ‘protective factors and processes’, and ‘positive outcomes’ – to identify the ‘mainstream’ values embedded within them. We recognised 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.

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 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. This view:

• leads to ‘victim-blaming’
• underestimates the impact of social class, race, gender, and disability on human experience
• shifts responsibility for human wellbeing on to the individual
• 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’.

Listening to teachers’ work-stories: Some methodological, ethical and sociological considerations

Anna Sullivan, Janet Hunter & Barry Down

How we construct more sophisticated understandings of why early career teachers choose to stay or leave the profession is a matter of pressing concern for governments, education systems, policy makers, schools and teachers alike. In this paper we want to examine the usefulness of teachers’ work-stories (Smyth, Dow, Hattam, Reid & Shacklock, 2000; Shacklock, 1995) as a methodological approach for the exploration of understandings and insights about the daily work habits, routines and behaviours of early career teachers. Work-stories are those ‘truths of experience’ (Shacklock, 1995) which reveal in rich detail ‘the tasks, the demands, the interactions, the complexity and the ‘feel’ of teachers’ work’ (p. 2). In a neoconservative policy context where teachers’ voices have been excluded from major educational debates, research and policy decisions (Gale, 2003), there is an urgent need to develop critical qualitative research approaches that are capable of illuminating how teachers make sense of, resist, negotiate and manage their personal-professional lives and at the same time, uncovering the social structures, discourses, and ideologies that serve to maintain the status quo (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005). Drawing on Willis (2004) this means developing research approaches that have an ‘ethnographic and theoretical sensibility’ (p. 168) capable of describing the importance of ‘lived culture’, ‘worldly experiences’, and practical sense making’ (Willis & Trondman, 2000, p. 5) in the context of the ‘workings of power’ (Foley, Levinson & Hurtig, 2000-2001, p. 42).

The paper will address a range of methodological questions the research team is grappling with during the early data collection phase of the research: Why teachers’ work-stories? How do we collect, organise and analyze teachers’ stories? How do we check out the stories? How might we represent these stories? How do we negotiate with stakeholders? What is the purpose of ‘Roundtables’? How do they work? What have we learnt? What are the ethical issues? How do we manage conflict? How do we think theoretically about our research? How does this inform our evidence? How does the evidence inform our theorising? How might we act politically and strategically in changing institutional practices?

Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience: Some early themes, questions and issues.

Rosie Le Cornu & Judy Peters

Ewing and Smith (2003) report that between 25% and 40% of beginning teachers in countries in the Western World are ‘burnt-out’ and are likely to leave the teaching profession in the first 5 years. Ramsay’s Report into teacher education in NSW (2000) also identified an upward trend in early career teacher resignations in Australia. As teachers’ work has continued to expand and increase in complexity, the public profile and standing of the profession has fallen (MCEETYA, 2003).  For these and other reasons, many Western nations are experiencing difficulties attracting new teachers and in keeping them once they are in the profession (Moon, 2007). The problems around teacher retention are exacerbated by the age profile of the teaching population. ‘It is projected that by 2010, more than half of those teaching in schools will have less than five years experience since graduating from their teacher education programs (Daily Telegraph, 30 Jan. 2007, p.7).’ In view of this crisis, there is a need to better understand the experiences of early career teachers and to investigate, in new ways, how the problem of teacher attrition can be addressed.

This qualitative research project is a collaboration between the University of South Australia, Murdoch University, Edith Cowan University and eight stakeholder organisations including employer groups and unions in South Australia and Western Australia. It aims to investigate how early career teachers negotiate and deal with systemic and local challenges to their personal and professional wellbeing during their first years of teaching. The findings will be used to inform support materials for use by systems, schools and teachers.

In 2009 sixty beginning teachers from the two states were interviewed at the beginning and end of the year. Towards the end of the year interviews were also held with one or more members of leadership teams in their schools. Data were also collected from a series of Roundtables held in each of the two states and attended by representatives from stakeholder groups. A grounded theory approach (Bernard, 2000) was used to identify some emerging themes that are presented in this paper. Findings presented will provide insights about:

• practices, processes and resources early career teachers use to engage productively with the challenges of their profession;
• the range of circumstances that put early career teachers at risk of leaving the profession; and
• conditions, policies, practices and resources that are conducive to promoting teacher resilience and retention in the first year of teaching.

Identity formation and resilience: exploring the links

Jane Pearce

A focus on the impact of situational factors on the resilience of early career teachers has led us to explore ways in which teachers engage in identity formation. Teachers at the start of their career are engaged in negotiating a new professional identity as they become teachers, while at the same time finding ways in which they can still be themselves in their teaching. We suggest that a key factor in the successful transition from being a pre-service teacher to being a teacher is the ability to sustain a coherent sense of one’s existing personal identity while at the same time developing a secure professional identity. In other words, early career teachers who are able to integrate new experiences into their existing understanding of self may be better able to manage the transition. In this paper we argue that successful engagement in identity work of this nature is a factor that contributes to resilience.

Identity formation is a discursive process, taking place as a result of interactions with others. For teachers at the beginning of their career, interactions with colleagues (teaching and non-teaching), students, and students’ families are crucial in developing teacher-like behaviours. Thus other people in the personal and professional lives of early career teachers, who themselves select from discourses that are culturally and politically based, have significant roles to play as teachers ‘do’ the identity work of selecting from the different discourses available to them. Teachers who struggle to reconcile the different demands of personal and professional identities might respond by behaving inconsistently, which in turn inhibits the development of a stable teacher identity.

In this paper we explore the different ways in which early career teachers ‘do’ identity work, in interaction with other people and through processes of reflection on their work, and discuss some of the ways in which their resilience might be enhanced by this process. We look at some of the discourses surrounding early career teachers’ identity formation, based on their experiences during their first year of teaching and focusing on critical incidents. We consider the role of others involved as early career teachers engage in the production of new professional identities, and focus particularly on how, through engaging in dialogue about identity development, teachers might engage productively with others in the process of building resilience.