Internationally, teachers leaving the profession is a significant challenge. Existing research indicates that teachers leave their profession because of heavy workloads, low salaries, challenging students, and the low social status of the profession and also due to increasing pressures brought on by accountability measures. Teacher attrition in the Finnish context brings an interesting twist to this discussion. In Finland, the numbers are smaller but still notable. This is interesting because many of the explanations found in other international contexts do not apply:

1) the social status of teachers is unusually high nationally and internationally;

2) Finnish teachers have not been subjected to the increasingly popular high-stakes testing or accountability measures used in other countries, and there are no official control mechanisms for Finnish teachers (no school inspectorate, no standardized testing, no detailed national curriculum, and no officially required teaching materials).

3) Finnish student teachers are, in general, highly motivated to become teachers. The demanding selection process tests this motivation, as less than 10% of applicants are accepted into teacher training. For example, in 2014 in the University of Oulu, where the research presented in this paper was conducted, there were 1866 applicants to the teacher education programs, and of these only 80 were accepted (fixed yearly intake).

So why do they give up the lottery ticket just as they are cashing it? Understanding this will give us more insights to the challenges and choices that leaving teachers make internationally, and the reasons behind such choices.

In this study, I took the lead mainly from Clandinin 2009 and Schaefer 2013, and looked at beginning teacher attrition as a question of identity making in the changing landscapes of teaching. However, I have applied a different set of concepts; instead of identity making and shifting, I speak of subjectification, drawing on the work of feminist poststructuralists. The research question is: “What are the discursive boundaries related to beginning teachers giving up their aspiration?”

The theoretical stand adapted here means that “teacher” is not something some individuals simply are (or are not), but it is something they do. They are not, however, free to do it as they wish, but they do it within discursive boundaries. Individuals do make choices, but such choice stems not so much from the individual but from the conditions of possibility. Youdell (2006, p. 36) suggests that such boundaries are maintained: 1) spoken and written language 2) representations 3) habitus, and 4) silence. In this way, when becoming subjects in specific educational and institutional discourses, beginning teachers cite the enduring educational and institutional discourses regarding who students or teachers are and what schools are about (Youdell, 2006, p. 37), and thus also contribute to producing these discourses. Those student teachers who fail to cite the appropriate discourses, or who take on performatives that are counter to prevailing institutional discourses, may be constituted outside the bounds of acceptability as a teacher (Phelan et al., 2006; Sumara, Davis, & Iftody, 2008; Youdell, 2006). Thus, in the process, some individuals come to be constituted by intersecting discourses as inside educational institutions, and others come to be constituted outside of these (Youdell, 2006).

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