Using A Transactional-Ecological Lens To Explore Career Change Preservice Teachers’ Developing Teacher Identity And Resilience
Author(s):
Denise Beutel (presenting / submitting) Leanne Crosswell
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
10. Teacher Education Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

10 SES 05 A, Professional Knowledge & Teacher Identity: Leadership

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-23
13:30-15:00
Room:
K5.18
Chair:
Shosh Leshem

Contribution

In the 21st Century, teachers’ work has become increasingly regulated and prescribed, with intensified bureaucratic responsibilities and keen public scrutiny (Hargreaves, 2010; Price & McCallum, 2015). At the same time, teaching remains fundamentally a caring profession, focussed on looking after other people and requiring high levels of social skills and emotional labour to successfully engage and motivate students, as well as maintain effective relationships with the broader school community (Aspfors & Bondas, 2013).  The combination of these intense and at times competing occupational demands requires teachers to demonstrate both a well-developed capacity for resilience (Gu & Day, 2013; Mansfield, Beltman, Broadley & Weatherby-Fell, 2016) and a robust professional identity (Beltman, Glass, Dinham, Chalk & Nguyen, 2015; Day & Lee, 2011).

Internationally, the demographic profile of teachers has also changed with a growing proportion of aspiring teachers taking non-traditional pathways to teaching (see Tigchelaar, Brouwer, & Korthagen, 2008) notably these are people who are changing from other professions to teaching. While career changers to teaching have the potential to contribute significantly to the broader profession, their entry to teaching is often through shorter, alternate programs that provide limited time and opportunities to develop their identities as teachers.  Experiencing contemporary classroom contexts during school-based professional experiences in preservice teacher education offers aspiring career change teachers the opportunity to ‘reality check’ their choice to become teachers and to test their personal assumptions about teaching against the realities of the classroom. School-based professional experience is often described as the most significant learning period (Ferrier-Kerr, 2009) and also the most stressful component (Chaplain, 2008) during teacher education.  The capacity to be resilient and thrive in difficult circumstances can be enhanced or inhibited by the nature of the context, in which individuals are immersed, the people in those settings with whom individuals associate and the strength of an individual’s beliefs or aspirations (Day, Kington, Stobart & Sammons, 2006).  As such, the professional experience context plays a critical role in the resilience of all aspiring teachers.  It is argued that it is during professional experience that teacher identities are most unstable (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2011). Further, it is posited that teacher identity development is even more intense for career-changers, as they need to navigate the transition from their previous career identity to a new professional identity as a teacher (Williams, 2010).

This paper adopts a transactional–ecological theoretical framework to explore our research question: How do school-based professional experiences influence the evolving teacher identity and associated resilience of preservice teachers who are career-changers?   Originally emerging from the field of developmental psychology (Sameroff, 2009, 2010) the transactional-ecological model has been used to better understand the ongoing transactions between the individual and the experiences provided by his or her social settings.  The transactional-ecological framework has been used previously to investigate both teacher identity (Day, Sammons, Stobart, Kington & Gu, 2007) and teacher resilience (Day & Gu, 2014; Johnson, et al., 2014).  From an ecological perspective, every social context or ‘ecology’ contains a number of social systems that an individual must understand and negotiate. The transactional–ecological framework comprises bidirectional, person-context transactions (Sameroff, 2010) in which the individual influences their environment and the environment reciprocally influences the individual.  The development as teacher is a product of the continuous, dynamic and reciprocal interactions of the preservice teacher and their experiences within multiple contexts during teacher education and so is transactional and ecological in nature. In this paper, the focus is on the transactions between the preservice teachers and the schooling contexts during professional experience.

Method

All preservice teachers enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Primary Education (n=72) graduate entry teacher education program were invited to participate in this study. The participants’ ages ranged from the early 20s through to over 50 years with a gender distribution of approximately 80% females to 20% males. The cohort’s prior university qualifications spanned the professionals of arts, science, psychology, business and law. Data were collected in this qualitative study via questionnaires administered to the participants at four key milestones over the two semesters of the one year program. Open-ended questions were used in the questionnaires to elicit extended responses. The first questionnaire administered in class on the first day of the program (t1) collected demographic data and background information of the cohort. Further questions sought to reveal the arriving cohort’s current perceptions of themselves as teachers and their preconceived assumptions of others as ‘good’ teachers along with key reasons for wanting to become teachers, their perceived strengths, and the anticipated challenges of the classroom. Participants completed the second questionnaire following a 5-day non-assessed immersion (t2) in a classroom with questions focused on revealing the impact this experience had on the career-changers’ emerging identities as teachers. The questionnaires following each of the two professional experiences (t3 and t4) focused on how the experiences impacted on their changing perceptions of themselves as teachers along with perceived successes, challenges, and sources of contextual and personal stresses and supports. Of 67 enrolled in the program at the end of the second semester of study, only 31 participants completed this fourth and final questionnaire as some preservice teachers were still on professional experience, having to make up days lost due to sickness, while others were at interviews for teaching positions. The researchers coded the data through an inductive process of content analysis (Mayring, 2004) with broad categories emerging after repeated readings of the data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). In the data analysis process, each researcher read and re-read the data separately looking for themes. Following the initial independent analysis, the researchers discussed the themes collaboratively and referred back to the original data. These themes were reviewed and refined throughout the process until agreement was reached on a stable set of categories by both researchers.

Expected Outcomes

Two key findings from our research will be discussed. First, the career-changers’ emerging teacher identities were adaptable and responsive to the challenging workloads and expectations of classroom teaching. It was evident that the cohort initially needed to significantly adjust their understanding of the work of teachers and their personal expectations of themselves. Yet, by the final professional experience, most of the group had normalised the intense demands of the workload. While this response may demonstrate the successful navigation of the complex transactional-ecological demands of teaching and/or a commitment to the profession, the rapid adaptation to the unexpected and intense demands should be viewed with some caution. Second, while strong and trusting relationships are central to teacher resilience (Mansfield et al., 2016), the classroom and school context offered inconsistent resources and support for these participants. However, this cohort’s substantial personal resources assisted them to effectively reframe and adapt their developing teacher identity and self-activate resilient behaviours during the classroom experiences. Of interest also is that the career-changers considered broader systemic support beyond the schooling contexts only at two key points (prior to their classroom experiences and at the end of the program when employment concerns dominated). Throughout their transactions with schools during professional experiences, the career-changers demonstrated highly agentic behaviours about their own development as teachers with consistent evidence of adaptable teacher identity and self-initiated resilient behaviours (Mansfield, et al., 2016). Both of these capabilities are critical for all new teachers transitioning into the profession. In light of our findings, our presentation will put forward several recommendations for teacher education and schooling contexts and for future research.

References

Aspfors, J., & Bondas, T. (2013). Caring about caring: newly qualified teachers’ experiences of their relationships within the school community. Teachers and Teaching, 19(3), 243-259. Beauchamp, C., & Thomas, L. (2009). Understanding teacher identity: An overview of issues in the literature and implications for teacher education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(2), 175-189. Beltman, S. , Glass, C., Dinham, J., Chalk, B., & Nguyen, B. (2015). Drawing identity: Beginning pre-service teachers’ professional identities. Issues in Educational Research, 25(3), 225-245. Chaplain, R. P. (2008). Stress and psychological distress among trainee secondary teachers in England. Educational Psychology, 28, 195–209. Day, C., & Gu, Q. (2014). Resilient teachers, resilient schools: Building and sustaining quality in testing times. Routledge: London. Day, C., & Lee, J. C. K. (2011). Emotions and educational change: Five key questions. In New Understandings of Teacher's Work (pp. 1-11). Springer: Netherlands. Day, C., Kington, A., Stobart, G., & Sammons, P. (2006). The personal and professional selves of teachers: Stable and unstable identities. British educational research journal, 32(4), 601-616. Ferrier-Kerr, J. L. (2009). Establishing professional relationships in practicum settings. Teaching and teacher education, 25(6), 790-797. Gu, Q., & Day, C. (2013). Challenges to teacher resilience: Conditions count. British Educational Research Journal, 39(1), 22-44.Howard, S., & Johnson, B. (2004). Resilient teachers: Resisting stress and burnout. Social Psychology of Education, 7(4), 399-420. Hargreaves, A. (2010). Presentism, individualism, and conservatism: The legacy of Dan Lortie’s Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Curriculum Inquiry, 40(1), 143-154. Johnson, B., Down, B., Le Cornu, R., Peters, J., Sullivan, A., Pearce, J., & Hunter, J. (2014). Promoting early career teacher resilience: A framework for understanding and acting. Teachers and Teaching, 20(5), 530-546. Mansfield, C., Beltman, S., Broadley, T., & Weatherby-Fell, N. (2016). Building resilience in teacher education: An evidence-informed framework. Teaching and Teacher Education, 54, 77-87. Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2015). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. John Wiley & Sons. Price, D., & McCallum, F. (2015). Ecological influences on teachers’ well-being and “fitness”. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3), 195-209. Sameroff, A. (2009). The transactional model. American Psychological Association. doi.org/10.1037/11877-001 Sameroff, A. (2010). A unified theory of development: A dialectic integration of nature and nurture. Child development, 81(1), 6-22. Tigchelaar, A., Brouwer, N. & Korthagen, F. (2008). Crossing horizons: Continuity and change during second-career teachers’ entry into teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24, 1530-1550.

Author Information

Denise Beutel (presenting / submitting)
Queensland UNiversity of Technology
Faculty of Education
Brisbane
Leanne Crosswell
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

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