In spring 2013 teachers all over Denmark were collectively locked out from their work as a culmination of a month long conflict between the teachers' union (DLF) and the association of municipalities (KL) representing the employers. After approximately three weeks of lockout, with lots of demonstrations, media attention, and fierce public debates about teachers, their working hours and the quality of the schools, the Danish government ended the conflict by introducing a law on the regulation of time and work, based on principles very similar to the initial claim of KL, who wanted the teacher’s working time “normalized”. The new working time law reduced time for preparation, required teachers to spend all their working time at the school, and gave school principals the right to decide how teachers should spend their working time. The law was supposed to be implemented the following year on the very same date as a major reform of all the public schools in the country. The reform was initiated by the Danish government as an attempt to ensure that one of the world’s most expensive schools would also be one of the world’s best schools. The Danish school system should be changed in order to ensure, that the pupils would learn more - without costing more.

As the lockout was ended by the introduction of the working time law, the teachers started working again. But they also started retelling themselves. While teachers are quite used to having their jobs discussed publicly, this experience was different. For some teachers the lockout had become almost a trauma, something that had disrupted their understandings of themselves, but also something that had changed the ways in which they felt their work was looked at, the ways in which they felt valued or evaluated by a gazing audience, by “society” (Graeber, 2013, p. 226). Teachers were apparently no longer expected to be vocational people who were believed to give a little extra to society precisely because they loved their jobs and were trusted to throw themselves enthusiastically into their work at whatever time of the day (Stavrakakis, 2010). They were believed to not work as much as they were paid to, why they were asked to transform themselves into people who would do what they were paid to do for as long as they were paid to do it - just like “normal” employees. This transition, turned out for some teachers to be so difficult, that they had to leave teaching in order to stay true to themselves. One teacher explains 6 months after the lockout:

”I am extremely provoked, when people say that now we have to move on. I can’t! (...) I take on over-responsibility in wanting to save those children (...) It is such a challenge to sleep at night as a teacher. But I want it! (...) But if I’m banged on my head and called a lazy pig, then I won’t!”

Shortly after, the teacher abandoned teaching. A newly published report shows that the number of teachers leaving their jobs has increased massively in Denmark since then, and we want to examine why this transition seems to be so disruptive to the teachers. In this paper we will examine some of the stories shared by teachers in their attempt to reconfigure their lost professional identities.

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