Investigating Early Career Teachers' Accounts of Their Trajectories in the Induction Phase

• In Event: Embracing Early Career Teachers: Getting Beyond a Deficit View on the Induction Phase

Abstract

This paper reports a socially-critical study that examined the ways in which early career teachers experience their work lives as they transition to the profession. Research from the past three decades has demonstrated the complexity of the issues related to this transition and the challenges they constitute. However, despite many new initiatives to support them better, “many of the issues of the early years that have caused problems for ECTs remain intractable, or at least unresolved for some.” (Schuck et al 2018). Such initiatives have not always been successful because they tend to adopt a deficit view of teachers and ignore the interwoven influences of the personal, contextual and systemic issues that impact on their work (Johnson et al., 2016). Our study aimed at taking a more encompassing view, focussing on the dynamic interactions between the early career teachers and their working conditions.
We drew on narrative data from semi-structured interviews that were held with the teachers and line drawings that the teachers prepared to reflect their trajectories. We analysed these interview transcripts and line drawings to make sense of the teachers’ critical turning points. In particular, we analysed the peaks, upward trajectories, troughs and the downward trajectories. This involved descriptive statistics to provide a summary of all the turning points and trajectories, which helped us get an overview of the prevalence of each emotional label. Using critical incidents as well as trajectory phases as sensitizing concepts, we reconstructed the particular contextualised meaning of these emotional experiences.
Data analysis documented the highly emotional nature of the transition into the profession, reflecting not only the individual’s sense-making but also the pervasive impact of the working conditions as determined by the school as an organisation as well as the policy environment. The study reveals that there are two major aspects contribute to the peaks and troughs of the early career experience: (a) the employment and working conditions, and (b) the intense and performative nature of early career teacher’ work.
The findings shed some light into the early career experience and enable us to unpack what may be happening in the lives of individual teachers, and the events, movements and actions that are happening in the broader society. We argue that their trajectories are highly influenced by systemic policies related to employment status and job certainty, and the intense and performative nature of early career teachers’ work.
We conclude that all too often, the central determinants of early career wellbeing focus on the specific strengths and weaknesses of individual graduate teachers. By individualising these explanations, we tend to lose sight of bigger issues that impact on their wellbeing. There is a need to consider the much broader structural, institutional and historical conditions that influence the early career teacher experiences.
Finally, by offering a greater understanding of early career teachers’ experiences, we contribute to the call to rethink the nature of early career teachers’ work to provide a better transition to the profession.

Authors

• Anna M. Sullivan, University of South Australia

• Geert Kelchtermans, University of Leuven