Anna Sullivan

Promoting early career teacher resilience: A framework for understanding and acting

In this paper, we undertake a brief review of the ‘conventional’ research into the problems of early career teachers to create a juxtaposed position from which to launch an alternative approach based on resilience theory. We outline four reasons why a new contextualised, social theory of resilience has the potential to open up the field of research into the professional lives of teachers and to produce new insights into the social, cultural and political dynamics at work within and beyond schools. We then move from these theoretical considerations to explain how we used them in a recent Australian research project that examined the experiences of 60 graduate teachers during their first year of teaching. This work led to the development of a Framework of Conditions Supporting Early Career Teacher Resilience which we outline, promote and advocate as the basis for action to better sustain our graduate teachers in their first few years of teaching. Finally, we reflect on the value of our work so far and outline our practical plans to ‘mobilise’ this knowledge in ways that will make it available to a variety of audiences concerned with the welfare of this group of teachers.

Early Career Teachers: Stories of Resilience

This book addresses one of the most persistent issues confronting governments, educations systems and schools today: the attraction, preparation, and retention of early career teachers. It draws on the stories of sixty graduate teachers from Australia to identify the key barriers, interferences and obstacles to teacher resilience and what might be done about it. Based on these stories, five interrelated themes - policies and practices, school culture, teacher identity, teachers’ work, and relationships – provide a framework for dialogue around what kinds of conditions need to be created and sustained in order to promote early career teacher resilience. The book provides a set of resources – stories, discussion, comments, reflective questions and insights from the literature – to promote conversations among stakeholders rather than providing yet another ‘how to do’ list for improving the daily lives of early career teachers. Teaching is a complex, fragile and uncertain profession. It operates in an environment of unprecedented educational reforms designed to control, manage and manipulate pedagogical judgements. Teacher resilience must take account of both the context and circumstances of individual schools (especially those in economically disadvantaged communities) and the diversity of backgrounds and talents of early career teachers themselves. The book acknowledges that the substantial level of change required– cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational – to improve early career teacher resilience demands a great deal of cooperation and support from governments, education systems, schools, universities and communities: teachers cannot do it alone. This book is written to generate conversations amongst early career teachers, teacher colleagues, school leaders, education administrators, academics and community leaders about the kinds of pedagogical and relational conditions required to promote early career teacher resilience and wellbeing.

Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience : A socio-cultural and critical guide to action

In Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience the stories of 60 graduate teachers are documented as they grapple with some of the most persistent and protracted personal and professional struggles facing teachers today. Narratives emerge detailing feelings of frustration, disillusionment and even outrage as they struggle with the complexity, intensity and immediacy of life in schools. Other stories also surface to show exhilarating experiences, documenting the wonder, joy and excitement of working with young people for the first time. This book makes sense of these experiences in ways that can assist education systems, schools, and faculties of teacher education, as well as early career teachers themselves to develop more powerful forms of critical teacher resilience. Rejecting psychological explanations of teacher resilience, it endorses an alternative socio-cultural and critical approach to understanding teacher resilience. The book crosses physical borders and represents experiences of teachers in similar circumstances across the globe, providing researchers and teachers with real-life examples of resilience promoting policies and practices. This book is not written as an account of the failures of an education system, but rather as a provocation to help generate ideas, policies and practices capable of illuminating the experiences of early career teachers in more critical and socially just ways at an international and national level.

Understanding and Challenging Dominant Discourses About Student Behaviour at School

We argue in this chapter that a particular set of discourses about student behaviour – those that can be loosely located in the ‘traditionalist-authoritarian-zero tolerance’ basket of ideas – have become dominant in society and, in particular, in many of our schools. We present evidence that a strong rhetoric of control characterises most debates about student behaviour despite counterarguments for more humane and civil approaches, and the availability of ample research evidence that calls into question the efficacy of ‘get tough’ approaches. Having established that authoritarian discourses about student behaviour at school are alive and well and are often used to ‘frame’ debates about how children can and should be treated at school, we then examine the reasons why these discourses continue to attract support. Accounting for the persistence of authoritarian responses to student behaviour requires an appreciation of the macro-level influences on schooling in neo-liberal times, as well as an understanding of the micro-level pressures that impact on teachers. We then examine how some teachers and schools manage to resist these practical and policy pressures to enact more humane and civilised ways of relating to students in school. Finally, we provide an insight into how schools can ‘answer back’ to the dominant discourses about student ‘behaviour management’ by rejecting deficit views of children and their families.

Introduction: Why It Is Important to Answer Back

This chapter presents an overview of the book and outlines its purposes. Firstly, it examines why there is a problem with the dominant views on student behaviour in schools. Secondly, it argues that the prevailing views of student behaviour in schools are about law and order to ensure safety, but that they ignore the complexity of behaviour, and the rights of individual students. These prevailing views are influencing policy and practice. To help understand the dominant thinking about behaviour in schools and to explore some ethical alternatives, this chapter describes the Australian policy context by outlining the background for the book. It then provides brief descriptions of each chapter and how they suggest new ways to ‘answer back’ to calls for more authoritarian responses to student behaviour within our schools.

Against the Tide: Enacting Respectful Student Behaviour Polices in ‘Zero Tolerance’ Times

School leaders are under pressure to ensure that their schools ‘manage’ students’ behaviour to establish ‘good order’. They are required to interpret, reconcile and make decisions about the plethora of legislation, policies and practices that relate to student behaviour in schools. This policy work is messy and complex, and influenced by ideological differences about the status children and the ways to ‘discipline’ them. The challenge for schools is to enact polices that do not aim simply to control students but rather aim to treat students with respect and enable them to develop as individuals with a sense of agency within a community of learners. This ‘policy work’ that schools do is the focus of the research reported in this chapter. We present findings from the Behaviour at School Study that show how schools can develop and enact respectful student behaviour policies.

‘Answering Back’: Some Concluding Thoughts

In this concluding chapter, we bring together some of the main ideas presented in the book to address three relatively straightforward questions about contemporary approaches to the management of student behaviour at school: What is wrong with the status quo? What maintains the status quo? What can be done to challenge the status quo? We assert that the book is deliberately provocative in that it critiques current student behaviour management practices, seeks to explain the flawed assumptions that justify those practices, and proposes how things could be better for children in our schools if different practices were adopted.

Promoting Pedagogies of Engagement in Secondary Schools: Possibilities for Pedagogical Reform

In this chapter we report on a research project that examined the potential for secondary school teachers to redesign pedagogy in schools serving low socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. The project assumed that unless we fix the pedagogy problem all other efforts at reconstruction will be in vain and students will continue to disengage from schooling. Rather than the forms of decontextualised knowledge that now dominate policy regimes, we argue instead for localised, contextualised accounts of what happens in schools to enable us to think about pedagogy as practice that arises from local conditions. Therefore we need thoughtful analyses of localised school-level logics, or rationalities, that give rise to pedagogical practices that engage students in meaningful learning. As such, in this chapter we propose the idea of the school as a ‘logic machine’ as a theoretical frame for such analysis. This provides a way for schools to move beyond focusing on ‘managing’ student behaviour to promoting pedagogies of engagement.

Policies and Practices

Policies and practices refer to the officially mandated statements, guidelines, values and prescriptions that both enable and constrain early career teacher wellbeing. Early career teacher resilience and wellbeing is enhanced when systems’ policies and practices show a strong commitment to the principles and values of social justice, teacher agency and voice, community engagement, and respect for local knowledge and practice.