Lee Schaefer

Early career teacher attrition: intentions of teachers beginning

Early career teacher attrition has most often been conceptualized as either a problem associated with individual factors (e.g. burnout) or a problem associated with contextual factors (e.g. support and salary). This study considered early career teacher attrition as an identity making process that involves a complex negotiation between individual and contextual factors. Forty second- and third-year teachers in rural, urban, and suburban boards across Alberta, Canada, who taught at different grade levels, were interviewed about their experiences with attention to their future intentions. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed in two ways: simple descriptive statistics on demographic data and thematic analysis of the interviews. The seven themes, developed inductively, were: (1) support; (2) an identity thread of belonging; (3) tensions around contracts; (4) new teachers will do anything; (5) balancing composing a life: Working hours; (6) the struggle to not allow teaching to consume them; and (7) can I keep doing this? Is this teaching? The results of the study prompted questions about how beginning teachers might be sustained by considering each person’s storied life, as well as about how teachers might be sustained on both their personal and professional knowledge landscapes.

Outdoor Time Is Associated with Physical Activity, Sedentary Time, and Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Youth

OBJECTIVEnTo determine whether time spent outdoors was associated with increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and related health benefits in youth.nnnSTUDY DESIGNnWe performed a cross-sectional study of 306 youth aged 13.6 ± 1.4 years. The exposure of interest was self-reported time spent outdoors after school, stratified into three categories: none, some, and most/all of the time. The main outcome of interest was accelerometer-derived MVPA (Actical: 1500 to >6500 counts/min). Secondary outcomes included sedentary behavior, cardiorespiratory fitness, overweight status, and blood pressure.nnnRESULTSnAmong the 306 youth studied, those who reported spending most/all of their after-school time outdoors (n = 120) participated in more MVPA (61.0 ± 24.3 vs 39.9 ± 19.1 min/day; adjusted P < .001), were more likely to achieve the recommended minimum 60 min/day of MVPA (aOR 2.8; 95% CI, 1.3-6.4), spent less time in sedentary activities (539 ± 97 min/day vs 610 ± 146 min/day; adjusted P < .001), and had higher cardiorespiratory fitness (49 ± 5 vs 45 ± 6 mL/kg/min; adjusted P < .001) than youth who reported no time outdoors (n = 52). No differences in overweight/obesity or blood pressure were observed across the groups.nnnCONCLUSIONSnTime spent outdoors is positively associated with MVPA and cardiorespiratory fitness in youth and negatively associated with sedentary behavior. Experimental trials are needed to determine whether strategies designed to increase time spent outdoors exert a positive influence on physical activity and fitness levels in youth.

Narrative Conceptions of Knowledge: Towards Understanding Teacher Attrition

The book volume shares six narrative accounts, which offer glimpses into the teachers lives, which are composed with attention to place, temporality, and personal and social dimensions. By inquiring narratively into the experiences of these teachers, the book identifies the complex ways in which the teachers personal practical knowledge is shaped by their personal knowledge landscapes as well as professional knowledge landscapes. Questions are raised about the implications of seeing teacher attrition as a process rather than singular event, that is, as a process of coming to tell a story to leave by, for our understandings of teacher knowledge and identity. As we shift from seeing beginning teachers to seeing teachers as beginning, that is, as seeing teachers as people with experiences of personal and professional becoming, we shift from seeing them as more than content knowledge and pedagogic skills, but as people in the midst of living lives. This narrative and more holistic understanding of teacher knowledge and identity will help preservice teacher education programs, schools and school districts to better sustain people as they begin to teach and become teachers

A narrative inquiry into the experience of negotiating the dominant stories of physical education: living, telling, re-telling and re-living

This paper explores the tensions that surfaced as a teacher of physical education (PE) shifted his ‘stories to live by’ [Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1999). Storying and restorying ourselves: Narrative and reflection. In A. Y. Chen & J. Van Maanen (Eds.), The reflective spin: Case studies of teachers in higher education transforming action (pp. 15–23). Singapore: World Scientific] around PE. The tensions became explicit when his shifting ‘stories to live by’ bumped against dominant narratives of PE that shaped his professional knowledge landscape. Our inquiry is framed by Deweys pragmatic ontology [(1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Collier Books] and Clandinin and Connellys [(1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press] narrative conception of experience as the living and telling, re-telling and re-living, of stories of experience. We also draw on Connelly and Clandinins [(1999). Storied identities: Storied landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press] narrative conception of identity as ‘stories to live by’ which is an embodied, fluid and context-dependent view of identity as situated at the interface between personal practical knowledge and professional knowledge landscapes. We begin with situating this work within the broader spectrum of narrative research. We then describe the relational processes of re-telling the stories through narrative inquiry and finally explore the re-living of these stories in order to show the tensions that surfaced as Ashleys ‘stories to live by’ shifted. We engage in the narrative inquiry process of re-telling using the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space (with dimensions of place, sociality, temporality), to show tensions and shifting identities. We conceptualize these tensions as moments of autobiographical revisions [Carr, D. (1986). Time narrative and history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press]. These revisions are seen as a part of a persons struggle for narrative coherence; a struggle to compose a life in the professional knowledge landscape that is meaningful to each individual. In these moments of autobiographical revision we show the reflexive relationship between living, telling, re-telling and re-living of stories. We end by considering what we have learned about our own stories to live by through this process and theoretically and practically suggest ways other teacher educators and physical educators might benefit from engaging in narrative inquiry work.

Teacher Education: A Question of Sustaining Teachers

In many places around the world, early career teacher attrition is a major concern. The costs associated with teachers leaving within their first 5 years of teaching are significant in economic terms. However, there are also concerns that the rapid movement of beginning teachers in and out of teaching creates less educative school and classroom environments and, consequently, less ideal learning conditions for students. Another significant concern is the impact on the identities of early career teachers who leave teaching.

Sustaining teachers’ stories to live by: implications for teacher education

ABSTRACT In this paper, we focus on questions around who we are as teacher educators as well as our responsibilities in helping pre-service teachers compose forward-looking stories as they prepare to begin teaching. We draw on the results of two studies in this paper: one a semi-structured interview study with 55 second- and third-year teachers in two Canadian provinces and one narrative inquiry into the experiences of early career teacher leavers. These studies showed how early career teachers’ stories to live by fuel their desires to become teachers. Teaching was a way to try to live out and sustain their stories to live by, that is, participants continued to live out their stories to live by shaped in early personal knowledge landscapes and embodied in their personal practical knowledge. We also learned that when teachers could not sustain their stories in the professional knowledge landscapes, their stories to live by shifted to stories to leave by, and they left teaching.

Composing a Life as a Teacher Educator

Abstract nThrough autobiographical narrative inquiry into the experiences of five teacher educators, we illustrate an alternative way of educating teacher educators. We show how learning to be, and become, a teacher educator occurs within a particular knowledge landscape at the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development (CRTED) at the University of Alberta. Drawing on a conceptualization of both personal and professional knowledge landscapes (Clandinin, Schaefer, & Downey, 2014), we highlight 13 features of the CRTED knowledge landscape that were particularly salient in the shaping of two of the authors’ practices as beginning teacher educators. The CRTED knowledge landscape differs from dominant university professional knowledge landscapes and is a kind of counterstory (Lindemann Nelson, 1995) that shapes the knowledge of teacher educators in distinct ways, that is, ways that call them to attend to lives, to stay open to diverse ways of knowing and being, and to the importance of response. Through learning to be and become a teacher educator within the CRTED knowledge landscape, we show how, within this landscape, teacher educators learn to shape different knowledge landscapes with teacher education students, through enabling them to learn to attend to personal knowledge landscapes, within teacher education and future classroom spaces, knowledge landscapes in which living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories of experience with one another is education.