Understanding a Chinese new teacher’s workplace relationships with Kelchtermans and Ballet’s professional interests framework

ABSTRACT

Kelchtermans and Ballet in their article entitled The micropolitics of teacher induction: A narrative-biographical study on teacher socialisation revealed five categories of professional interests for beginning teachers. Their professional interests framework is adopted to study a Chinese new teacher’s workplace relationships. The research relies primarily on an in-depth interview and observations to collect data. It is found that self-interests, organisational interests, cultural-ideological interests and social-professional interests are the most prominent interests that undergird the teacher’s relationships with principals, colleagues, and parents. Based on these intertwining interests, she has generally positive (i.e. friendly, cooperative, supportive, etc.) relationships with the principals and most colleagues while negative (i.e. conflicting, competitive, etc.) relationships with parents and novice colleagues. The research has implications for building more constructive relationships from the professional interests perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• New teacher
• workplace relationships
• professional interests
• micropolitical perspective
• socialisation

Funding

This work was supported by Foundation of President of Hebei University [2019HXZ006].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).