Arising from their own primary and post-primary schooling, beginning teachers commence practice with approximately fourteen years of experience with schools and with teachers. These experiences can act as a lens through which they view their initial or induction year of practice, post-graduation.

Coloured by the events and individuals in their school lives, beginning teachers often draw on their own teachers as role models, emulating their positive qualities or choosing to diverge from their negative traits. These role models can significantly impact a teacher's professional self-image and their vision of what it means to be a good teacher (Korthagen2004).

Utilising the term “history-in-person” to conceptualise the historical production of persons in practice (Holland & Lave 2009), and predicated on the belief that there is value in flagging that the site of beginning practice is not only grounded in place but is always deeply historically or temporally constituted (Hardy and Edwards-Groves 2016), this study investigates how, during their initial year of practice, post-graduation, the dispositions and practices of nine beginning primary teachers, in Irish schools, are influenced by past teacher role models. 

The main research question is: Do participants attribute importance to the influence of previous teachers on their professional roles as beginning teachers?

Centred on the socio-historical context of their own schooling, the biographical experiences that constitute their personal histories are deemed to influence the professional self-image of beginning teachers (Steadman 2024;Beijaard 2019; Morrison 2013).   

Central to this approach is the idea that human existence is fundamentally characterised by temporality. People, beginning teachers in the present instance, have a personal history.

Prompted by the work of Bukor (2015), this study is centred on the research participants’ beliefs, assumptions, perceptions, and interpretations. All aspects of practice are interpreted through an individual’s belief system. Therefore, the influence of teacher role models on the practices of beginning teachers is best understood when embedded in the context of beginning teachers’ lives and examined from an individual’s ‘personal interpretive framework’ (Kelchtermans 2009).

Past teacher role models influence the formation of a ‘personal interpretative framework’ (Kelchtermans 2009), a set of beliefs that operates as a lens through which beginners observe, give meaning to and react to experiences, situations and conditions in their teaching jobs.

Within this framework two different, yet interconnected domains need to be distinguished: professionalself-understanding andsubjective educational theory (Kelchtermans 2009).

The first domain, professionalself-understanding, refers to beginners’ conception of themselves as practicing teachers. Conceptually, a sense of temporality or historicity pervades professionalself-understanding, as beginners’ actions in the present are influenced by meaningful experiences in the past and expectations about the future.

The second domain, subjective educational theory, relates tothe personal system of knowledge and beliefs about education that beginning teachers use when performing their job, the basis on which they ground their decisions. Beginners’ subjective educational theory is largely idiosyncratic and based on personal experiences. The idiosyncratic character of beginners’ beliefs about education, arising from the apprenticeship of observation experienced during their primary and secondary schooling (Lortie 1975), magnifies the likelihood that they will imitatively rather than analytically replicate the practices of those teachers who are most like them in terms of personality and preference (Gray 2020).And yet beginning teachers implement practices that both echo and push back against their childhood and adolescent experiences in classrooms(Mewborn & Tyminski 2006). In acknowledging an anti-apprenticeship of observation, Moodie (2016) noted the disparity between negative experiences and negative role models some beginning teachers had as students and the positive pedagogies they enacted in their own classrooms. This self-reflection helps them create a more positive learning environment for their students. 

In the final semester of their teacher education programme, student teachers were invited to voluntarily provide their contact details to be part of the study. In all, thirty student teachers volunteered to participate in the study. Subsequently, at the commencement of the school-year in September, employing a multiple-case study research design (Cohen et al. 2018), nine participants, six females and three males, ranging in age from 22 to 31 years, who worked as beginning teachers in nine separate primary schools, in Ireland, were purposively selected from among the cohort of thirty volunteers. Selection determinants related to workplace location, feasibility, manageability and the vagaries of the beginning teacher employment market. That the nine participants worked in nine different schools maximised the variation characterising the research sample (Flyvbjerg 2006). This constitutes a methodological advantage, as prior research has shown how the beginning year of practice is always influenced by the context and culture specific to a school (März & Kelchtermans 2020). However, the limited size and purposive composition of the research sample means that the concept of transferability rather than generalizability applies to the study conclusions. To elicit beginning teachers’ narrative accounts of their first-year experiences, data, in the form of anecdotal narratives of lived experience, was collected through semi-structured, individual conversational interviews with each of the nine research participants (Brenner 2006; Kvale & Brinkmann 2009; Swain & King 2022). Anecdotes are understood here as narrative accounts of incidents, situations, occurrences and episodes, experienced by the participating beginning teachers, as they relate to the aim and purpose of the study. A three-cycle, individual interview design facilitated continuing contact with each research participant. Therefore, throughout their initial year of occupational experience, three individual conversational interviews were conducted with each participant, i.e., during October, March and June of the beginning year of practice. Repeated readings of the data set progressively refined the selection of data for presentation. Operationally, a system based on the colour coding of interview transcripts was devised. While selected data can be considered to reflect the experiences of multiple participants, nonetheless, informed by constructivist principles relating to diversity, multiple realities and the uniqueness of each case, the singularities of personal experience remain to the fore. Thus, this study perceives beginning practice as primarily embedded in the unique lives of individuals. Anonymity arising from the use of pseudonyms means that no uniquely identifying information is attached to collected data.

Interview data are drawn upon to substantiate conclusions that indicate that study participants attribute a great deal of importance to their prior schooling experiences, namely to the influence of previous teachers on their professional roles as beginning teachers. Part of each beginner’s ‘personal interpretative framework’ (Kelchtermans 2009), the realities of the school and of the classroom are interpreted through the lenses of these formative experiences. Shaped in early personal knowledge landscapes and subsequently embedded in their practices, beginning teachers’ images of being a teacher and of good teaching are intrinsically related to their own experiences as students. Hence, the study evidences that the influence of early teacher role models, both positive and negative, help form the nascent teaching identities of beginning teachers. Drawing inspiration from teachers who fostered a love of learning, beginners strive to emulate these qualities in their own teaching, aiming to inspire students and make a positive impact on their lives. Negative early teacher role models are also a significant influence on beginners. Principally, negative school memories cause beginners to resist emulating particular practices in their own teaching. Four issues attest to the potential contribution of the study. Firstly, in focusing on the influence of early role models, the study historicises the practices of beginning teachers. Secondly, in foregrounding the relationship between teacher beliefs and practice across time, the study signals the need for longitudinal research on how this relationship develops. Thirdly, to facilitate student teachers and beginning teachers to have a strong understanding of self as professional, initial teacher educators and induction-phase mentors need to be facilitated to reflect on their own early socialisation experiences. Fourthly, through revealing the influence of early teacher role models on beginners in Ireland, this study serves as an example of how the particular encompasses and reveals the universal.

Beijaard, D. (2019). Teacher learning as identity learning: models, practices, and topics. Teachers and Teaching, 25(1), 1-6. Brenner, M.E. (2006). Interviewing in Educational Research. In: Green, J. L., Camilli, G. and Elmore, P. B. (Eds.) Handbook of Complementary Methods in Education Research, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 357-370. Bukor, E. (2015). Exploring teacher identity from a holistic perspective: Reconstructing and reconnecting personal and professional selves. Teachers and Teaching, 21(3), 305-327. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2018). Research Methods in Education. 8th ed., London: Routledge. Flyvbjerg, B. (2006) Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research, Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219-245. Gray, P. L. (2020). Mitigating the apprenticeship of observation. Teaching Education, 31(4), 404-423. Hardy, I. and Edwards-Groves, C. (2016). Historicising teachers’ learning: a case study of productive professional practice. Teachers and Teaching, 22(5), 538-552. Holland, D. and Lave, J. (2009) Social practice theory and the historical production of persons, Actio: An International Journal of Human Activity Theory, 2, 1-15. Kelchtermans, G. (2009) Who I am in how I teach is the message: Self-understanding, vulnerability and reflection, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 15, 257-272. Korthagen, F. A. (2004). In search of the essence of a good teacher: Towards a more holistic approach in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(1), 77-97. Kvale, S. and Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing, 2nd ed., London: Sage. Lortie, D. C. (1975) Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. März, V., & Kelchtermans, G. (2020). The networking teacher in action: A qualitative analysis of early career teachers' induction process. Teaching and Teacher Education, 87, 102933. Mewborn, D. S., & Tyminski, A. M. (2006). Lortie's apprenticeship of observation revisited. For the learning of Mathematics, 26(3), 23-32. Moodie, I. (2016). The anti-apprenticeship of observation: How negative prior language learning experience influences English language teachers’ beliefs and practices. System, 60, 29-41. Morrison, C. M. (2013). Teacher identity in the early career phase: Trajectories that explain and influence development. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 38(4), 91-107. Steadman, S. (2024) ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’: What the ITE reforms in England mean for teacher identity (and why it matters). In: Ellis, V. (Ed.). Teacher education in crisis: The state, the market and the universities in England. Bloomsbury Publishing. 163-178. Swain, J., & King, B. (2022). Using informal conversations in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, 16094069221085056.