Change Advocacy: Student Teachers and Beginning Teachers Coping With Emotionally Challenging Situations

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

Abstract

In a Swedish context, beginning teachers are portrayed as both agents changing society for the better, but also as lacking adequate preparation for teaching. The position of being a newcomer in education, both as a student teacher and a beginning teacher, involves facing challenges that requires action. This action involves student teachers being active agents, but also affecting and being affected by the organization of schools and teacher education.
The aim of the study was to investigate student teachers’ and beginning teachers’ perspectives on how they cope with challenging situations by acting for change. Since we were interested in the perspectives of the participants, and their definition of the situation, we adopted symbolic interactionism as theoretical framework. We adopted a qualitative methodology, guided by constructivist grounded theory (GT) and a short-term longitudinal design. Twenty-five student teachers were recruited from six teacher education programmes in Sweden. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants during the last year of teacher education, and then 20 of the 25 participants were interviewed approximately two years later after their first year of teaching.
The findings show and further develop rationales and distinctions of change advocacy strategies in regards to emotionally challenging situations. The strategy of change advocacy referred to trying to change the origin of the emotional challenge. When engaging in change advocacy, student teachers and beginning teachers thought the change would lead to a better fit with their ideals. When adopting the change advocacy strategy, student teachers thought schools could be influenced to perform better, and a confrontation would then inevitably occur to spark the change. The student teachers and the beginning teachers found the strategy to be troublesome, since it was sometimes hard to uphold as a student teacher as well as a newcomer at schools. Student teachers depicted change advocacy as inevitable, as someone needed to engage in making things better. Beginning teachers commonly found themselves in conflict trying to influence the practice of their school. For example, beginning teachers who tried to enhance the quality or effectiveness of the school in accordance with their ideas might end up with doing a lot of extra work. In adopting a change advocacy strategy, collaboration with colleagues was important. Being able to find a companion and form an alliance in the micro-political setting of a school made working for change less challenging. In addition, the participants discussed turnover between schools until finding a school that matched their ideals as a strategy, making their choice and agency visible in the challenges facing newcomers.

Authors

• Henrik Lindqvist, Linköping University

• Maria Weurlander, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

• Annika Wernerson, Karolinska Institutet

• Robert Thornberg, Linköping University