Theoretical and practical discourses about education are navigating through stormy and paradoxical seas (Aviram, 2010). Everybody seems to agree on the importance of education for individuals, societies, culture and economy. However, countries, having managed to make education a right and a duty for all citizens, are undergoing profound restructuring processes (Goodson & Lindbad, 2011). Cuts, hardening working conditions, and precarious employment, are widespread.

Everyone seems to be aware that the artefacts (schools and universities) created in the last 250 years, as privileged forms of imparting education, demand extensive and profound change to meet the needs and challenges of today's individuals and groups. Deep and rapid changes in: the processes of creating, representing, storing, accessing and transmitting information and knowledge (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, et al., 1994); the growth, extension and permeability of digital technologies in all realms of people’s life (Brown, 2000); the economy (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005); the production and work organization systems (Sennett, 2012); and the meanings of contemporary culture (Buckingham, 2003), are shaping a world increasingly alien to most educational systems. To decipher and understand the keys to that world and participate in a responsible manner requires knowledge and skills that school systems today seem incapable of providing. However, instead of tackling these problems in their contexts without denying their complexities, the slow but steady movement of restructuring installed in a good number of countries seems to point to the dismantling of a system without the appearance of serious proposals for how to transform it into a better one.

Teachers, as an essential element of the current educational systems (OECD, 2005), are undertaking an increasingly demanding job and have to perform ever more complex and demanding tasks that require huge capacity and emotional and intellectual effort (Hargreaves, 1998). However, the entrance systems to the initial professional development programs, the initial professional development itself, the selection for the job, the working conditions, the professional support, and the actualization systems, seem far from being the best possible. Even more, in recent years, restructuring movements, neoliberal views about the role of the state, the vision of education as a business and not as a right, among others, are having an enormous impact in the teaching profession, especially among those starting their careers (Sancho & Correa, 2013).

As present is future, and future is built on decisions made today, as educational researchers we should explore how the background and experiences of beginning teachers on initial and in-service professional development programs and in their first professional experience are shaping their professional identity.

This symposium brings together a set of research-based insights about what it means to enter the teaching profession in contemporary Europe. Using different methodological approaches, the papers offer a comprehensive view of student teachers’ transitions from initial professional development to the job, the kind of working conditions found, the support or lack of support provided and the multiplicity of required tasks.

Aviram, A.  (2010). Navigating Through the Storm. Reinventing Education for Postmodern Democracies. Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers.

Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, E. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London-New York: Verso.

Brown J. S. (2000). Growing Up Digital. How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn.Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 32(2), 10-20.

Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: literacy, learning and contemporary culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. & Trow, M. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications.

Goodson,  I. F. &  Lindblad, S.  (Eds.) (2011). Professional Knowledge and Educational Restructuring in Europe. Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers.