Circumventing erosion of professional learner identity development among beginning teachers

ABSTRACT

Similar to many other OECD countries, contemporary policy approaches to teacher professional learning in Australia are tied to the standardisation of the profession and characterised by compliance and performativity regimes of teacher participation in prescribed modes, types and quanta of professional learning. In this paper, we argue that such models fail to effectively support early career teachers’ engagement and growth in professional learning and erode the possibility of positive professional learner identity development. Through the lens of identity construction and attribution theory, we report on the ways 16 beginning teachers positioned themselves as professional learners while working in diverse school contexts across one large Australian educational jurisdiction. Findings from the analysis of semi-structured interviews highlight how important balanced and measured attributions of causality are to professional learner identity development. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional learning
• teacher identity
• beginning teachers attribution theory

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the early career teachers who gave their time to participate in this research. Their insights were invaluable to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Weiner conceives significant experiences as occurring along a positive-negative continuum.

2. Independent schools in Australia are defined as those that are governed independently of government or Catholic school authorities (Independent Schools Council of Australia [ISCA], 2016).

3. Key themes emerging from data analysis included: 1. intended and enacted professional learner identity tensions, 2. beginning teachers’ professional learner identities, 3. factors influencing attributions of casualty, and 4. the complexity of teachers’ work.

4. The single outlier to this study has not been addressed in this paper due to the complexity of the specific case, and instead will be reported on in a separate and forthcoming paper.

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Ellen Larsen

Ellen Larsen has been a Lecturer in Education at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) since 2016. She commenced working in Initial Teacher Education after a long career as a classroom teacher and mentor. She has also worked at the sector level, responsible for the conceptualisation and implementation of professional learning strategies for teachers at all career stages. With a strong research interest in professional learning, early career educators, teacher identity and educational policy, Ellen completed her doctoral research in 2019 investigating beginning teachers and the development of their professional learner identities. Ellen’s most recent book is Teachers as professional learners: Contextualising identity across policy and practice, published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Jeanne Maree Allen

Jeanne Allen is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education and the Higher Degree Research Convenor in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University. Entering tertiary education after an extensive career in secondary teaching and school leadership, Jeanne is internationally recognised for her research in the fields of teacher education, standardised educational contexts, teacher identity and student engagement and retention. Her most recent books are Young adolescent engagement in learning: Supporting students through structure and community (2019), published by Palgrave-Macmillan, and Learning to teach in a new era (2nd ed.) published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.