‘It’s not about punitive’: exploring how early-career teachers in high-poverty schools respond to critical incidents

ABSTRACT

This article explores how early-career teachers working in high-poverty schools in Australia account for their decision-making during critical classroom incidents. Classroom management solutions are problematized by investigating how two teachers take up particular positions, make decisions, and enact what they believe to be ‘quality teaching’ in context. Through a combination of interviews and observations of teachers ‘in situ’, we examine what these teachers do, why they do it, what informs their decisions, and how they reflect on their actions. The complexity of teachers’ work in schools located in high-poverty areas is highlighted. We argue that both early-career teachers prefer to position themselves within ‘pastoral’, in contrast to ‘disciplinarian’, discourses, as part of constituting the school as a site of possibility and teachers who advocate for youth growing up in poverty.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom management
• Critical incidents
• high-poverty schools
• teacher accounts
• teacher–student relationships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The NETDS program has been preparing pre-service teachers since 2009 and is now offered in seven Initial Teacher Education programs across Australia.

2. This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP140100613).

3. The ICSEA scale allows for ‘fair and reasonable’ comparisons among schools with similar/like students.

4. Both pseudonyms.

5. Names of both teachers and students have been changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [2013001388].

Notes on contributors

Jo Lampert

Jo Lampert is a co-founder of the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools program. She has worked in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education and teacher education for social justice for over twenty years, and is a Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Bruce Burnett

Bruce Burnett is a co-founder of the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools program and works in the area of sociology of education with a particular interest in teacher education within the high-poverty schooling sector. He is a Professor at the Australian Catholic University.

Barbara Comber

Barbara Comber is a Research Professor in the School of Education at the University of South Australia. Her current research focusses on how young children are learning to write now and also how early-career teachers understand and attempt to enact quality teaching in schools located in low socio-economic status areas.

Angela Ferguson

Angela Ferguson is Director at Queensland Government Department of Education and Training-Department of Education and Training (Queensland, Australia).

Naomi Barnes

Naomi Barnes is a researcher at Queensland University of Technology with a particular interest in transitions into teaching.