The first years teaching are believed to be of essential significance to the beginning teachers’ sense of efficacy and survival in the teaching profession (Kyriacou & Kunc, 2007; Bezzina, 2006; McCormack & Thomas, 2003). Consequentially, a wealth of research exploring the experiences of teachers over the first professional years informs the theory and practice of teachers’ professional development and learning through early career stages. Generally, the research problem is either located in accounting for the various contextual or processual features facilitating or hindering the induction process, or in exploring the aspects related to human agency potentially explaining certain functionalities to the betterment of this process. Whilst the breadth of contemporary research on teachers’ learning and professional development may have successfully advanced in answering questions of what success and failure may look like, or where and when it may be located and how it can be fostered or hindered, research has yet to consider how affective spaces of success and failure are articulated and contested, or how they arise in everyday situations and in daily professional lives. In this report it is proposed focusing on understanding the role of space and place in how beginning teachers experience success and failure throughout the first years into the profession. Methodologically, this report builds on the results of a photovoice workshop (Wang & Burris, 1997) with a group of beginning teachers in Romania, and their logs in individual reflective journals throughout the 2021/2022 school year. It is proposed a non-representational approach to understanding the taking place of success and failure in the experiences of beginning teachers. The non-representational is rooted in the idea that understanding the lived world happens by engaging with it as an ongoing and performative achievement (Thrift, 2004). Affect is the key non-representational idea serving as a study framework for examining beginning teachers’ affective geographies of success and failure throughout the first professional years as a multiplicity of perspective taking, making up for its ecological nature - a multiplicity that emerges from interactions among heterogeneous elements, human and otherwise (Scwanen and Atkinson, 2014). In this specific framework we are testing a variation of Andrews’ hypothesis (Andrews et al, 2014) stating that, much like wellbeing, the affective geography of success and failure at work is something that emerges as environment (rather than something that results, or is consciously taken from environment).

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