‘A validation of my pedagogy’: how subject discipline practice supports early career teachers’ identities and perceptions of retention

ABSTRACT

For secondary school teachers, developing a teacher identity is complicated by spoken or implied expectations of the need to be an expert in the skills and knowledge of one’s subject discipline. Since 2009, the Teacher as Practitioner study (N = 764) has explored the effect of continued subject discipline practice on teachers’ identity and retention using a longitudinal mixed-method design. Within the population are 305 responses from initial teacher education graduates classified as early career teachers, those within their first five years of teaching. This sub-sample was used to explore relationships between discipline practice, identity and perceptions of retention in the profession. Analysis of quantitative data showed time spent engaged in practice had a greater effect on expectations of retention and identity than simply aspiring to maintain a discipline practice, while qualitative analysis showed maintaining a practice in a supportive community was also highly valued.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher-practitioner
• identity
• teacher retention
• teacher practice

Introduction

Since 2009 the Teacher as Practitioner (TAP) longitudinal study, based in two Australian universities, has tracked the experiences of those institutions’ secondary teacher graduates. It has produced findings that inform, amongst many things, the critical international issue of unacceptable retention rates of early career teachers. On this topic, the literature shows research has yet to reach agreement on the wide scope of retention issues. The scope of the problem is further complicated by a lack of data to accurately track teachers’ careers post-graduation from initial teacher education. Despite the complex nature of teacher retention, the primary intent of this article is not to bring clarity to that broad discussion, but rather to look at a promising solution to teacher exodus within the secondary school context. Specifically, it will explore some of the findings from the TAP study, which aims to investigate the efficacy of a discipline-based community of practice intervention to improve teacher retention in secondary education, as enjoyment of their major subject area is a key motivator for pre-service teachers entering into initial teacher education (Manuel and Hughes 2006). This article will explain how a concept this study defines as being a practitioner positively affects a large cohort of early career teachers. It will briefly elaborate this concept, how it can be assimilated into teachers’ identities, and provide evidence to suggest practitioner activity increases early career teachers’ expectations of retention.

Teacher retention

Reports in Australia and internationally consistently claim that the number of teachers leaving the profession constitutes a crisis (AITSL 2016; OECD 2005; Productivity Commission 2012; Worth et al. 2018). Evidence shows this is occurring in a volume disproportionate to similar high-stress professions such as policing and nursing in other countries, such as England (Worth et al. 2018). However, gathering accurate empirical evidence on teacher retention is challenging for a number of reasons. One is difficulty in mapping teacher movement (Fenwick and Weir 2010; Weldon 2018). Another is imprecise or inconsistent descriptive terminologies used in the literature; these include attrition, mobility (Ingersoll, Merrill, and May 2014; Weldon 2018), wastage (Weldon 2018) and even temporary attrition (Ingersoll, Merrill, and May 2014). Addressing poor retention is further complicated by a range of factors argued to influence this decision by teachers. The literature commonly cites the five-year mark as constituting premature departure from the profession, and posits the causal factors being one or more of the following: workload isolation and burnout (Buchanan et al. 2013; Hong 2010; O’Brien, Goddard, and Keeffe 2007), a lack of work–life balance (den Brok, Wubbels, and Van Tartwijk 2017; Hudson 2012; Hultell 2011), poor leadership or administrative support exacerbated by early career teachers’ under-training in administration duties associated with the profession (Ashiedu and Scott-Ladd 2012; Gallant and Riley 2014; Mason and Poyatos Matas 2015) and issues created by teaching in remote or isolated geographic locations (Cuervo and Acquaro 2018; Sharplin 2008; Sharplin, O’Neill, and Chapman 2011). Salazar Noguera and McCluskey (2017) showed these are significant issues for early career teachers that result in a mismatch between their perceptions of teaching and the realities of the profession across Australia and Spain; yet any academic disagreement about accurate numbers or actual causal factors are put into perspective when one considers its ramifications – the well-being of teachers during the first years of their career. In this regard, the number of effective interventions aimed at assisting teachers through these issues is remarkably small. While there has been a significant investment in induction and mentoring for early career teachers, these supports are often removed in one to three years and do not support teachers across the course of their career (Fenwick and Weir 2010; Langdon et al. 2014). We need to better understand teachers in order to determine what is needed to keep early career teachers optimistic about their long-term, quality engagement in the teaching profession. Consequently, research into teacher identity and how teachers develop as professionals is essential.

Teacher identities

Defining and measuring teacher identity is difficult, made so by the combination of internal factors, professional and personal traits, and external factors including environment, culture and interactions that, in sum, constitute a teacher identity (Bukor 2015; Hong 2010; Hong, Day, and Greene 2018). Teacher identity is challenging to measure because identity itself is multidimensional (Hong, Day, and Greene 2018; Popper-Giveon and Shayshon 2017) and cannot be externally measured – only an individual’s expression of their identity can be observed ‘in the form of beliefs, assumptions, values, and actions as well as in the various ways one perceives and interprets oneself and the world’ (Bukor 2015, 306, emphasis added). Despite this, understanding teachers’ professional identity is essential as it ‘provides a framework for teachers to construct their own ideas of how to be, how to act, and how to understand their work and their place in society’ (Popper-Giveon and Shayshon 2017, 532).

In the secondary education context, defining identity includes acknowledging two ‘sub-identities’, teacher and subject specialist (Popper-Giveon and Shayshon 2017). It is critical that all teachers can teach well; that is, they develop pedagogical knowledge and skills, they build relationships with students, staff and parents, and they work as part of the overall school community. It is also essential for them to be a subject specialist with expert skills and knowledge about the subject areas they are trained to teach. These aspects of the role often constitute competing demands on teachers’ time, focus and belief systems (Deffenbaugh, Hatfield, and Montana 2006). A consequence is, as Popper-Giveon and Shayshon (2017) highlight, that graduating and beginning teachers often emphasise their development as teacher over that of subject specialist, reducing to second place the role of discipline skills and knowledge.

It is at this juncture, the equal negotiation of these two sub-identities, that the TAP study is situated. TAP aims to implement a practice-based intervention as one strategy to positively affect quality teacher retention, doing so longitudinally so that the effects on teachers over time can be explored. This article uses the growing dataset from TAP to more deeply explore the experiences of early career teachers that actively shape their identity. It is essential that we understand early career teacher development so that changes can be effected in both initial teacher education and induction programmes before beginning teachers decide to leave the profession. Consequently, this analysis of early career teachers in the TAP data aimed to explore relationships between discipline practice, teacher-practitioner identity and perceptions of retention in the profession for early career teachers.

Teacher as practitioner, defining being ‘a practitioner’

TAP’s understanding of the practitioner has been refined over time. The study began with secondary visual arts graduate teachers in 2009 as a response to poor data concerning three myths being regularly professed by early career teachers in this discipline: (1) that teachers slowly diminished personal practice of their discipline due to the demands of teaching; (2) that diminishing this practice negatively impacted teaching quality; and (3) the result of these two factors was early exit from teaching. With that clear focus, practitioner was treated in TAP during the early years as synonymous with the actions educators went through as they reflected on their own teaching (Imms and Ruanglertbutr 2013), the teacher practitioner concept common in educational literature (Reis-Jorge 2007; Wall and Hall 2017). The study’s data uncovered a more sophisticated interpretation of practitioner as it expanded to include science teachers who reported similar tensions between practice and teaching (Imms and Healy 2016). These tensions include teachers who feel their ‘new’ discipline practice is the act of designing and delivering creative lessons (Kempe 2012), a hybrid between an art/science practitioner and a teacher practitioner. TAP’s definition, still in use, sees a practitioner as a secondary teacher who actively undertakes the activities and conventions of the subject discipline that originally brought them to teaching, beyond the expectations of their employment. For TAP, this definition still separates personal discipline practice from teaching practice. Rather than drawing on a hybrid identity such as those defined by Kempe (2012) and others, it defines the practitioner-teacher as someone who maintains dual identities as a discipline practitioner and a teacher.

In short, it is doing one’s subject, or, as one participant observed, ‘debunking that rubbish that “those who do do, those who can’t … teach”’ (Participant X, personal correspondence, 13 June 2014). Further to this, significant work emanating from the A/R/Tography group based in Canada has added yet another highly affective layer, viewing practice as integral to one’s wider existence, being ‘a form of inquiry that resonate[s] with their ways of being and becoming in the world’ (Irwin et al. 2017, 476). These three layers of being a practitioner – reflective, reflexive and embodied – describe a complex interaction between what one knows (subject discipline knowledge and skills) and one’s active use of that knowledge (practice).

This then is the context for TAP’s understanding of how being a practitioner assists quality of teaching and retention. It is not, however, complex at user level; TAP participants do not believe that to meet these criteria teachers need to maintain a second profession or dedicate a substantial amount of time to subject discipline practice. On the contrary, TAP is finding that producing one artefact of practice per year is sufficient for teachers to maintain a teacher-practitioner identity (Morris et al. 2018).

Materials and methods

TAP is a longitudinal, mixed-method study conducted at two Australian universities in differing states. Teachers are sampled upon completion of their initial teacher education course and volunteer to participate in the study. Each year participants are asked to self-select into one of two groups; a control group who complete an annual survey in the first half of the year, and an intervention group who complete the same survey but also participate in an exhibition/exposition in the second half of the year. The exhibition/exposition is held annually at both universities and displays participants’ art or science artefacts, and an event opening is also held to provide professional networking opportunities for the participants. While the intervention was initially intended to support teachers’ practice as part of their ongoing individual professional learning, the longitudinal design of the study has resulted in TAP becoming a community of practice where teachers can share and discuss their discipline practice and its impact on their classroom teaching (Morris and Coleman 2019; Morris, Coleman, and Imms 2019). As the aim of the intervention is to be sustainable for participants across their changing career and life experiences, it is possible for participants to move between the control and intervention group each year. Ethical clearances are provided by both universities who participate in the study, and all graduating students are invited to participate in the longitudinal study by a researcher who has no existing dependent relationship with them. Due to the length of the study, a process of re-consenting occurs annually (with the survey) so that participants can withdraw from the study at any time.

Participants

The full TAP dataset includes 764 responses from teachers across their first to their ninth year of teaching. The dataset includes individuals from both undergraduate and postgraduate initial teacher education courses, and from both visual arts and science majors. Understandably, the majority of the dataset is comprised of visual arts teachers, as science teachers only joined the study in 2017. It is important to note that the full dataset also includes individuals who are no longer teaching or are taking leave from teaching for a short period, yet still choose to participate in the TAP study.

For this analysis, a purposive sub-sample of early career teachers was taken from the full dataset. To qualify as an early career teacher, participants needed to be within their first five years of teaching and ‘mostly or fully employed as a teacher’, which includes teachers in short-term contract teaching. A total of 305 teachers were included in the sub-sample. A total of 77% of sampled teachers were female and 23% male. The majority of teachers completed postgraduate initial teacher education courses (91%), with the remaining 9% completing undergraduate studies in the past three years (since this cohort joined the study). Most teachers were between 25 and 30 years of age at the time of data collection (35%), but there were a range of ages represented in the sub-sample: 16% were 23–25 years, 25% were 31–35 years, 13% were 36–40 years, 9% were 41–50 and 2% were over 51 years of age.

Instrument

The TAP survey was specifically designed for the study due to a lack of validated measures around the core variables being explored. The survey structure was analysed to ensure it validly and reliably measured the target constructs of the study: (1) teachers’ desire to practise, (2) teachers’ perceptions of their quality of teaching, and (3) their expectations of retention in teaching as a career (see Morris and Imms 2018). The survey contains 66 items organised by six overarching sections:

1. Demographic information;

2. Items related to participants’ discipline practice, outside of their normal teaching and school duties;

3. Items related to participants’ teaching careers;

4. Items related to teachers’ perceptions of their quality as a teacher;

5. Items related to identity perceptions (that is, the balance between identifying as a practitioner and/or a teacher);

6. Items related to participation in the TAP exhibition/exposition intervention.

Sections one, five and six consist of predominantly nominal items to collect background information; the remaining sections measure latent variables through Likert scales. There are also a range of qualitative questions in the survey where participants are asked to explain their response to particular items; these questions intend to gather rich description of individual participants’ experiences. The survey is administered in the first half of the school year (early April) via an online platform. Participants have approximately four weeks to complete the survey.

The current analysis includes the following nominal identity question in order to categorise participants into teacher-practitioner identity groups: ‘In general I see myself as: (1) a practitioner, (2) a practitioner who teaches, (3) a teacher who practises, or (4) a teacher.’

Teachers’ practice is measured in two ways; first, through nomination of the amount of time per week they spent undertaking practice, and second, through the desire to practise scale. This scale asks them about their intention to practise while teaching with items including, ‘I have a desire to practise while pursuing a teaching career’, and ‘In order to stay in teaching, I need to think that I will always participate in my practice.’

Teachers’ intention of remaining in the profession long term is measured through the teaching as a career scale, which includes items such as: ‘At the moment I feel I am likely to leave the teaching profession within the next three years’ (negatively worded), and ‘At the moment I am very comfortable identifying myself as a teacher.’ Both the desire to practise and teaching as a career scales are summed to produce scores for further analysis.

In addition, some questions about external supports for practice are included in the TAP survey. Teachers in the TAP sample respond to two items regarding school support specifically. First, they rate the resourcing provided to them on the item ‘During the past 12 months, my school has made provisions for my practice (e.g. allocation of time, space, resources in order to make artistic works, scientific works etc.).’ Second, they respond to a more general statement about affective support, ‘During the past 12 months I have received support from my school for my practice.’ These items are also included in this analysis to explore the effect of external support on teachers’ practice and intention to remain in teaching, although these questions were only added to the survey in the past two years.

Analyses

One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests were used to determine differences between group means based on identity, amount of practice (in hours) and those who felt supported/unsupported by their school. Dependent variables explored in the analysis included teachers’ desire to practise and their intent to remain in teaching as a long-term career. Identity was also treated as a dependent variable, where the amount of and desire to practise were explored in relation to teachers’ teacher-practitioner identity development. Due to unequally distributed variances, Games-Howell was used post hoc to determine where group differences were found.

As the survey also collects qualitative responses, data from the early career teachers were downloaded and coded to provide explanatory information alongside the statistical analysis. A deductive approach in which the researchers developed an initial codebook based on the research aims (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006) was used for this study, as the qualitative analysis aimed to explain the quantitative data. In this study, four key themes were included in the codebook: defining teacher and/or practitioner identities, inhibitors to maintaining a discipline practice, supports to maintaining a discipline practice, and perceived outcomes from maintaining or discarding discipline practice when beginning teaching. The comments by early career teachers were then coded against these themes, with ‘analysis of the text at this stage … guided, but not confined, by the preliminary codes’ (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006, 88). This approach still allows for inductive themes to emerge and be added to the initial codebook; however, in this study, all content fell into the broad pre-defined themes. Pertinent quotes from the early career teachers are included in the findings to provide some insight into the lived experiences of the early career teachers in this dataset.

Results

Earlier sections of this article argued a need to better understand some affective components of the broad teacher retention issue. With that in mind, analysis reported here had two main aims; first, to determine how practice relates to identity development for early career teachers, and second, to explore the effect of practice-based activities or support on early career teachers’ intent to remain in the profession.

In the sample, there are both undergraduate teachers who have studied a Bachelor of Education (Secondary) majoring in visual arts, and postgraduate teachers who completed an art or science degree prior to studying a Master of Teaching in either visual arts or science. Logically, these two groups come to the teaching profession with different practitioner identities, due to both the differing nature of their disciplines, and also the training degrees they undertook. Regarding the latter, while undergraduate pre-service teachers learn to become a practitioner (artist) and teacher simultaneously, postgraduates tend to enter education with a strong identity as an artist/scientist practitioner that is transformed as they add the new identity of teacher. Consequently, it was anticipated that the Master of Teaching group may have a higher desire to practise, based on their existing practitioner identity. A one-way ANOVA was used to explore any difference between the undergraduate and postgraduate groups in terms of a desire to practise; no significant difference was found, F(2, 298) = .56, p = .573. This suggests that all teachers in the sample had a similar desire to practise once they started teaching, regardless of their previous study/work experiences.

Two aspects of practice were measured to explore its relationship to identity. First, quantity was measured through teachers indicating how many hours they spend per week practising in their subject discipline. Second, the desire to practise scale was used to measure teachers’ interest in sustaining discipline practice (for the full scale see Morris and Imms 2018). Hours spent practising did have a significant effect on teacher-practitioner identities, F(3, 290) = 2.39, p < .01. Those defining themselves as practitioners spent more time practising their subject discipline (M =  1.75, SD = .957) than any other group (practitioners who teach M = 1.36, SD = .686, teachers who practise M = 1.08, SD = .276 and teachers M = 1.05, SD = .216). Yet, no significant difference between groups was found when exploring teachers’ desire to maintain their practice, F(3, 290) = .13, p = .748.

As time spent engaging in practice had a significant effect on early career teachers’ identities, its effect on teachers’ perceptions of retention was also explored. While it is generally positive to have teachers who see themselves as practitioners and teachers (Graham and Zwirn 2010), any educational impact from these teachers will only occur if they stay in the profession. Like identity, the number of hours an early career teacher spent on practice also affected their perceptions of retention, F(3, 297) = 5.63, p = .001. Those who spent between 6 and 15 hours per week on their practice were more likely to be positive about their retention in the profession (M = 3.73, SD = .447) compared with those who practised less (0–5 hours per week, M = 3.28, SD = .741) or more (16–25 hours per week, M = 3.50, SD = .548; note: 26 or more hours per week can’t be reported as there was only one person in the group). Yet the qualitative data from TAP showed early career teachers struggled to find time to maintain practice: ‘I am focused on teaching first to gain experience and learn from different environments. My art practice fits around my teaching.’ It was common to find early career teachers making a clear distinction between what was their ‘personal’ discipline practice and their ‘professional’ teaching career.

The separation of practitioner and teacher is disappointing because having a teacher-practitioner identity itself was found to positively influence perceptions of retention, F(3, 290) = 14.62, p < .001. Those who did not have a practitioner identity (i.e. teachers) had lower perceptions of retention (M = 2.48, SD = .917) than those with a dual identity (teachers who practise M = 3.35, SD = .602, practitioners who teach M = 3.65, SD = .494) or practitioner-only identity (M = 3.50, SD = .577). Workload and stress were cited as the main barriers to maintaining a dual identity, as typified by comments such as:

I cannot balance creativity time with the extra pressures necessary to exist in the teaching profession. There is too much paper work and expectations of extra workloads, my personal endeavours are not considered, only the job is important and therefore my creativity is stilted.

Yet other teachers in the sample had altered their employment to accommodate their practice: ‘My school has given me .80 [of a full-time workload] so I can pursue my art practice.’ Even when this strategy worked for teachers, pursuing art meant taking a step back from the classroom in some capacity. It was also common for teachers instead to focus on their development as a teacher in their early career years: ‘Due to the stakes tied with teaching (grade, financial, etc.), I often prioritise teaching over practice.’

In addition to exploring internal factors, school support for practice was also examined as an external motivator for teachers to maintain their discipline practice, as identity is also constructed by an individual’s experiences and interactions. It is also relatively common for schools to offer induction support for early career teachers, so the TAP survey aimed to explore any practice-based support offered to teachers. The early career teachers generally felt that practice-based provisions given by the school had no effect on their intentions to remain in the profession, F(3, 25) = 1.10, p = .367. However, as the question about provisions has only been recently introduced into the survey, the number of responses was much lower for this item (n = 28). In contrast, the question about general support was significant for teachers’ retention, F(4, 296) = 3.30, p = .01. Those who felt more supported had colleagues attend their exhibition/exposition openings or follow their practice on social media, or were publicly recognised for their practice at staff meetings or events. Yet, it should be noted that most staff felt their school was unsupportive (53.9% negative compared to 24.6% positive, 21.5% unsure). Some participants who were positive made a distinction between their colleagues and the school more broadly; for example, ‘While my colleagues and I support each other and encourage each other’s art production as best we can, the school does not ask or know our intentions and pursuits as artists/designers.’ Perhaps more worryingly, some early career teachers perceived that their practice was uncommon in the profession: ‘I don’t think it’s common for people to think of art teachers as artists. Every time I draw something, people at schools are shocked that I’m doing it.’

While the effect of teachers’ discipline practice on student learning is beyond the scope of the study, teachers commented on how their practice has changed their classroom teaching. Student engagement was often cited as a benefit of showing practice in the classroom: ‘While it takes time, I noticed that students were more engaged and encouraged to see me undergoing a similar process to them. This would often lead to better discussions and motivation.’ Links to teacher authenticity were also made, such as, ‘I generally find that students are interested in my own art practice as it validates my skills and knowledge for them in a concrete way, I also find it helps the students to relate to me.’

Discussion and conclusion

The data collected to date has built evidence of the importance of discipline practice for the professional development of early career teachers, as those who keep a practitioner component to their identity have stronger retention aspirations than those who see themselves as teachers alone. The analysis showed the importance of spending regular time on practice as part of developing these fluid/dual teacher-practitioner identities.

Yet maintaining a discipline practice was not easy for early career teachers. Issues of workload and administration hampered their ability to create, and this in turn impacted on their identity development. While some early career teachers chose to alter their employment in order to make time for practice, there was an element of being asked to make a choice between practice or teaching. Similar to Popper-Giveon and Shayshon (2017), early career teachers in this study often prioritised their development as a teacher over that of a subject specialist. While developing interpersonal relationships, learning administration tasks and caring for students and colleagues is very important, it is also vital that teachers see their identity as multidimensional (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009; Popper-Giveon and Shayshon 2017; Salazar Noguera and McCluskey 2017). This means being a teacher as well as a subject specialist who can motivate students to extend their learning within the subject discipline, and maintain the passion for their subject that originally brought them to teaching (Manuel and Hughes 2006).

In terms of school support, early career teachers were not particularly positive about getting support for their discipline practice. Yet, they were more positive about affective supports, such as colleagues and students giving feedback about their work, than they were about broader (or perhaps leadership-level) support for their practice. It is possible that early career teachers were offered different types of supports that were not related to discipline practice development, but these fall beyond the scope of this particular study. Burnout and isolation are two common causes of teachers leaving the profession (Buchanan et al. 2013; Hong 2010; O’Brien, Goddard, and Keeffe 2007) and consequently, supports such as mentoring and induction are often provided to help settle early career teachers into the teaching profession generally (Langdon et al. 2014; Ronfeldt and McQueen 2017). Yet these types of supports are generally taken away after the first few years of teaching (Langdon et al. 2014); they are not the type of support that grows with the teacher, even though we know a teacher’s identity and learning needs change over time (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009; Hsieh 2014). As school culture is a critical factor shaping teacher identity and development (Hong, Day, and Greene 2018), it is essential that schools also promote the importance of developing teachers with expert skills and knowledge in their subject discipline areas.

The findings from the TAP dataset have implications for how schools and teacher education providers develop secondary school teachers and promote retention of quality teacher-practitioners. In order to develop secondary teachers as both educators and subject specialists (Popper-Giveon and Shayshon 2017), it is essential to balance ongoing learning in both these domains. TAP is showing that annual engagement with practice through producing one artefact for exhibition/exposition per year is sufficient for teachers to maintain a teacher-practitioner identity (Morris et al. 2018). Yet it is also important that early career teachers are given opportunities to interrogate their identity and consider how their growing experiences shape both their identity development and their classroom practice (Hsieh 2014). The degree to which teacher-practitioners in the TAP dataset are doing this is currently unknown.

Future research could examine the school context more closely to explore what supports could be provided to teachers as they develop their identity within the beginning years of teaching, and the extent to which identity development happens both within and beyond the walls of the classroom. It is also critical for research to explore the changing needs of teacher-practitioners over time, accounting for the effect of lived experiences and differing professional needs over the course of a teacher’s career. These are limitations of the current study, which could also be extended to an international context to examine the degree to which teachers within varying settings experience similar challenges.

While these data were collected from an Australian sample, the issue of teacher retention is international. It is essential that a range of interventions to improve quality teacher retention are implemented, as teacher development is highly individualised and requires diverse strategies that support teachers in differing contexts (Hong, Day, and Greene 2018). The TAP study, just one intervention for secondary teachers, is an example of how discipline may support early career teachers’ perceptions of retention.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Melbourne Educational Research Institute Seed Funding (The University of Melbourne).

Notes on contributors

Julia E. Morris

Julia E. Morris is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, Edith Cowan University. Her research focuses on the development of quality teachers, including the role of teachers (at all stages of their career) and learning environments in supporting students’ engagement in learning. She joined the Teacher as Practitioner (TAP) project in 2016 to explore how discipline-based engagement impacts teacher identity and retention.

Wesley Imms

Wesley Imms is an Associate Professor in spatial pedagogies, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Australia. He has published widely and conducted extensive research into a variety of issues that impact teaching excellence. His work in the Teacher as Practitioner (TAP) project since its inception in 2009 has focused on better understanding the impact of teachers’ own discipline-based activity on the quality of their classroom teaching.