Life as an Early Career Teacher: Career Trajectories and Professional Development

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

Abstract

Teacher induction implies complex negotiations by the early career teachers with their professional environment over time. Although the individual person of the early career teacher, his/her expertise, needs and experiences are relevant, understanding the induction phase also benefits from a career perspective, looking more in particular at the specific (structural) dynamics of the career, contract conditions as well as the time factor (see Bayer, Brinkkjær, Plauborg, & Rolls, 2009).
Therefore the goal of our study is twofold. First, understanding the career stories of early career teachers can give an idea about aspects related to choosing and having a teaching career as well as the challenges, changing work lives and career pathways. We focus on their narrative and retrospective reconstruction of their first career phase.
In our analysis of the career stories we aim at a deeper understanding and conceptualization of early career teachers’ professional development as a career-long process. Sensitizing concepts guiding our analysis are critical incidents and persons, operating as key experiences, creating challenges, forcing the teachers to rethink particular beliefs/practices. As such we aim at better understanding their professional development resulting from these meaningful interactions, as situated in the time-space context that constitutes their workplace.
The theoretical framework informing our study builds on concepts and insights from narrative-biographical perspective on professional development, (i.e. personal interpretative framework), micro-political theory as well as the relational dimension of their professional development (Frelin, 2010).
Using a follow-up multiple-case study design, we collected data from 5 teachers (selected from Flemish primary schools, Belgium). Using a semi-structured guideline, we interviewed all respondents four times during their first 14 months after graduation, and revisited them five years later. The interviews were complemented by formal career trajectory data (questionnaire). All interviews were transcribed verbatim, coded and submitted to qualitative interpretative analysis.
The findings represent the contextualized professional development over 5 years of teaching (as reflected in the narrative retrospective accounts). We demonstrate how the contextualization in time and space, focusing on the core relationships inside the school, affects the development of teachers’ personal interpretative framework. Special attention is given to the meaning of critical incidents and persons. Furthermore we demonstrate the development of their micropolitical literacy: early career teachers learn to navigate and negotiate their place within the school in relation to their formal (i.e. employment), as well as the relational working conditions that are inherent to the teaching job. By investigating their professional learning on the job, and the core relationships, we gain insight into how informal learning can be supported, encouraged and developed (Marsick & Volpe, 1999).
Our study contributes to the empirical evidence and theorizing of professional development as a process. We problematize the taken-for-granted effectiveness of mentoring, providing evidence that other relations and forms of informal learning are also important. Finally, we provide evidence that early career teachers should not just be treated as “in need of support”, but also as actively contributing to the expertise in the school and an important asset for school development.

Authors

• Sarah Marent, KU Leuven

• Ruben Vanderlinde, Ghent University

• Geert Kelchtermans, University of Leuven