The challenges of early career academics (ECA) in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have been extensively described in the literature; the learning processes academics face in their careers are inherently emotional (Bloch, 2016; Walker, 2017), yet that needs some unpacking. ECA in European HEI face precarious working conditions, high competition, etc., to which teaching labour is added. The literature shows that ECA work in Europe can be experienced both positively and negatively (Hollywood et al., 2020; Nästesjö, 2020; 2022; Stupnisky et al., 2016), or succinctly stated: mixed (Bloch, 2016). Additionally, teaching is often identified as one of the major duties of early career academics. Thus, the pressure to perform in all fronts and levels undoubtedly frames the experience of entering this field of work. Still, the literature has been inconsistent when describing their experiences and therefore some have concluded that what predominates here are mixed feelings.

This article works with the idea that teaching is only one aspect of an already emotionally demanding job and yet it is not necessarily intentionally or formally in advance. This would be a contrasting point with what research training in a doctoral programme or industry/practice professional background would offer to a job-seeking novel academic. Thus, this article also draws from the research on doctoral education for teaching and the emotionality that plays out from the experiences of the role, of teaching and of learning, to get a better sense of the phenomenon.

Managing the emotions related to teaching has been considered the emotional labour of teaching in HE (Salisbury, 2014), and some of the ECA struggles arise from managing the demands of the teaching role plus the intrinsically emotional aspects of it. In this sense, how early career academic experience their academic work at the start of their journey in a broad sense would be complemented by how they experience teaching as something still to be learnt and developed.

Within this context, ECA experiences of the role and of teaching may also reflect their experiences of learning. Thus, other concepts like affection and emotions of/in learning become relevant to understand this field. Arguably, mainstream research in Europe on this topic has turned towards analysing if emotions foster or hinder learning (Loon & Bell, 2018; Pekrun, 2011). Diffusive research outcomes on the field have been synthesised in a recent literature review where Mustafina et al. (2020) argue that both positive and negative emotions can affect learning either positively or negatively. This idea, although an accurate representation of the field, is not particularly helpful.

Within these fields of research, the argument stated here is that early career academics experience their role in different ways, just as they experience learning in different ways. This realization paves the way for the main contribution of this paper: a theorical re-work of an already researched area. The aim here is to articulate a body of literature that arguably showcases contradictory experiences of teaching of academics in their early years of entering this field of work, which is also congruent with the contradictory experiences of learning.

This paper contributes to the field by conceptually re-working ECA experiences of work in European HEI in general, and teaching and learning in particular, to argue that experiencing itself might be inscribed within a learning process. To do so, this paper explores the concept of perezhivanie by Vygotski (1994) to provide a theorical framework to examine the phenomenon from another light. Re-working this phenomenon through perezhivanie means that the experience of ECA could be collectively learnt and thus, that it could be intentionally produced and transformed in specific ways in different educational settings.

The field of educational research often has been described as lacking some strong theoretical frameworks (Aswin, 2012; Tight, 2012). However, recent ideas such as “theory work” (Hamann & Kosmützky, 2021) depart from a theory deficit approach towards looking into how exploring different academic fields working-through them from different theoretical frameworks might lead to innovation and interesting discoveries. Certainly, such practice is not new. Exemplified notably in conceptual enterprises such as Habermas re-reading of the work of Horkheimer and Adorno (Habermas & Levin, 1984), or the more recent book edited by Murphy & Costa (2015) regarding the use of Bourdieusean theory to re-work educational research issues, it is clear that old problems benefit from looking at them through different ideas and theories. Thus, this article first explores how clearly distinct experiences have been described in the literature. Understanding the necessity of learning for the role and, in particular, learning to teach as something that has no necessary prior training before appointment, this paper then outlines how learning to teach might feel according to the literature. As a further development, this paper explores and synthesises some of the literature on how learning feels, looking to find parallels between both bodies of knowledge. There, the argument will be extended to include that learning itself is experienced in different ways. The unique contribution of this paper comes from its “theory work”. Here, experiencing can be thought of as something that is learnt through the concept of perezhivanie by Vygotski (1994). To that end, a brief theorical exploration of the concept of experience is develop as a frame from which to move towards the concept of perezhivanie.

In this paper, the contribution to the literature on how ECA experience their role in general, and experience teaching in particular, with perezhivanie would be that such experiences of learning new things and roles are not clear-cut natural phenomena but are socially constructed and learnt over time. In this sense, the scattered findings of the literature on how ECA experience such processes can be better understood when further articulated through the concept of perezhivanie. Through the concept of perezhivanie, a case can be made for articulating such contradictions by arguing that said phenomena are inscribed in a learning process. In other words, experiencing is learnt. Through the concept of perezhivanie, it can be stated that experiencing is something that is learnt, built over time, and it transforms emotions and meaning making by working-through the experiences collectively and mediately. In this sense, the scattered findings of the literature on how ECA experience such processes can be better understood as articulated through the concept of perezhivanie. This research show promise of great significance for education as it would elaborate on a way of understanding experiences of learning, newness, change and transitions in a way that is open to transformation. If experiencing in learnt, then how ECA experience their work and teaching can be intentionally fostered in a way that is less disruptive and conflictive for them. These ideas could be extended into the wider field of teacher training and professional development as a way of thinking about workplace insertion schemes such as mentoring programs or certificates.

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