The investigation reported in this paper continues and deepens a study initiated several years ago (Lameul, 2008, 2016; Eneau, Lameul, & Bertrand, 2014) aimed at understanding the construction of a subject in his or her personal as well as professional posture - the two being intimately related. To date, our research has defined the notion of posture as "the physical or symbolic manifestation of a mental state, shaped by our beliefs and oriented by our intentions, which exerts a guiding and dynamic influence on our actions, giving them meaning and justification" (Lameul, 2006). This can be studied from the following structuring dimensions: biographical, psycho-sociological, sensitive socio-cognitive, pragmatic, and ethico-cultural. Within the framework of a phenomenological approach, posture is situated at the heart of the professional development process at the interface of two axes: one that goes from the subject to the social and another in which the personal and professional dimensions of the process meet. This is what leads us today to question the work and training environment of beginning teacher-researchers.  We will take an eco-anthropological approach and focus on the conditions that are more or less favorable to their development.

Our paper will report on a study conducted with 15 teachers at the beginning of their careers who were involved in training within the framework of the project Développement d'un Enseignement Supérieur Innovant à Rennes (DESIR), in response to the call for projects Développement d'Universités Numériques Expérimentales (Development of Experimental Digital Universities) and financed by the French National Research Agency. The training of these new lecturers, known as "Training for the first position", combines pedagogical, political and scientific aspects in its structure in three elements :

1. A compulsory training module of 32 hours in accordance with the national training framework (decree of February 8, 2018) aimed at deepening the pedagogical skills (general or specific to the disciplinary field) necessary for the exercise of the profession of teacher-researcher.
2. A time of discovery of the different activities and services of the university: meetings and dialogues with the vice-presidents of the university concerned (18h).
3. The design and implementation of an innovative teaching project, situated in the professional environment to which the student belongs (teaching team, disciplinary department) and accompanied by the educational engineers and researchers of the DESIR Living Lab.

Within the framework of this DESIR project, an empirical survey has been set up for the last three years at the end of the training course which accompanies the new teacher-researchers when they take up their duties. Its objective is twofold: to understand the informal learning that takes place when a new teacher takes up his or her post, accompanied by pedagogical training; to identify the dimensions that come into play in order to build and/or consolidate a professional posture. The aim is to continue exploring the process of constructing a posture by trying to understand, close to the teacher-researchers in training, what in their environment would "make an ecological niche" (Guérin, Simonian and Thiévenaz, 2023, forthcoming). In the course of our interviews with 15 teachers, we will therefore pay attention to everything that can have an amplifying or conversely annihilating effect on certain dimensions of posture considered to be a key element of professional development.

Our survey is conducted with 15 teachers whose context we have just described above. Our questioning grid is based on the 8 conditions identified as potentially facilitating - or at least influential in the process studied - in our previous work. These 8 items are as follows: 1. "Rupture": frequent realization through moments of rupture and transition in a journey (Kaddouri and Hinault, 2014) 2. "Tensions": Exploitation of the variety of tensions caused by its dynamics of successive and interrelated changes (Engeström, 1987, 2011) 3. "Intimate dialogue": Emanating from an ability to bring deep structure and provisional identity into dialogue (Linard, 2002) 4. "Reflexivity": Deployment in the dynamics of a reflexive approach that relates experience and inquiry (Thievenaz, 2017) 5. "Human mediation":The determining importance of the encounter with benevolent mediators in accompanying this process (Bandura, 1998; Albero, Linard and Robin, 2009) 6. "Resilience": Necessary anchoring in life experience (all personal and professional experiences) and mobilization of a capacity for resilience that allows one to overcome hardships and bounce back (Dewey, 1938; Cyrulnik, 1999) 7. "Commitment": supported by a personal readiness to move forward and a full commitment to action (intervention and transformation) (Jorro and De Ketele, 2013) 8. "Recognition": the effect of recognition (personal, from others, and institutional) as a support and regulator on professional development (Eneau, 2005). Assuming that the 8 items of this analysis grid will shed light on what in the teacher's environment is likely to make a niche for a subject, the objective of the survey we are reporting on here is to identify their presence or not, to assess their importance in the eyes of the respondent, and to highlight possible interrelationships between these dimensions.

Our results confirm the explicit existence of several of these conditions from the phase of entry into the profession for the teachers. For example, a language teacher (A.M) expressed in a few words several types of tension that inhabited her training environment in her first year as a beginning teacher. The expressions of doubt about her ability to perform this academic profession, of her destabilization by the gap between what she thought she knew and what she was confronted with, echo items "rupture", "tensions" and "resilience". Item "human mediation" present in the interview with A.M is more particularly developed in that of Y.V who explains well how the collective (that of the colleagues-learners but also that of the colleagues of the daily professional life is important to support the effort to be made in a "1st job training" device and to concretize in his practice the knowledge acquired during the training. This same analysis reveals that in the context studied, the other items are less frequently present : the reflexive dimension of the conditions for professional development expressed in items "intimate dialogue", "reflexivity" and "resilience", as well as the strength of personal commitment, are almost non-existent. Several hypotheses can be put forward: the methodological conditions of a single, short interview did not facilitate the expression of these results; entry into the profession tends to focus the teacher on the short, immediate time of the response to be given or the face to be saved, or even the survival to be ensured (Mukamurera, Uwamariya, 2005). This observation of a lesser presence of certain items in the description made by novice teachers of their training environment is nevertheless enlightening our project to identify the characteristics of an ecological niche. These are all avenues for further research and inspiration for teacher training.

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