This paper explores the knowledge practices of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) as they emerge in the transition from formal teacher education to professional practice in Danish primary schools. When student teachers move from one educational context to another, changes occur in how professional knowledge is expressed and transformed over time (Bernstein, 2000). These changes have implications for teachers’ professional development and pedagogical practices. This is important to consider as the first year in the profession has been shown to be crucial for the NQTs’ further development as professionals (Flores & Day, 2006).

This paper investigates changes in NQT’s conceptions and beliefs about the teaching profession. It provides a sociology of knowledge analysis of how NQTs understand teacher knowledge and the teaching profession and how these understandings are expressed and shaped during their first year as teachers.

The research questions guiding the study are: What specialized knowledge and qualities are valuable in the field of newly qualified teachers? How do specialized knowledge and qualities interact to shape a newly qualified teacher?

The aim is not to argue that one type of knowledge is more valuable than another. Instead the paper highlights the complex nature of enacting and developing professional knowledge during the transition from teacher education to working life, as well as the tensions and challenges involved.

There is no clear answer to what teacher knowledge is or of what constitutes teachers’ knowledge practices. Grimen (2008) describes the teachers knowledge base as consisting of multiple disciplines and experiences influenced by a wide range of actors. These actors may include a school’s organizational culture, leadership, mentoring arrangements, collegial communities, subjects and national policy (Bertram, 2023). Each of these may hold different understandings of what teacher knowledge is and what a professional teacher should know and be able to do (Cochran-Smith et al., 2012; Shay, 2013).

Within the sociology of education (Bernstein, 2000), knowledge is understood as something that is recontextualized within educational fields, where discourses and social practices shape what knowledge is, can be and ought to be. Through the processes of selecting, adapting and transforming knowledge, professional knowledge is constructed (Hordern, 2015). How knowledge is conceptualized in teachers’ work influences how they position themselves and develop as professionals (Afdal & Nerland, 2014).

To examine how professional knowledge develops as teachers move from education into employment the paper draws on Maton’s sociology of knowledge, which extends the perspectives of Bernstein and Bourdieu. Maton (2014)conceptualized educational fields as knowledge domains in which struggles over status and resources take places. Actors’ beliefs, dispositions, experiences and practices incorporate competing claims to legitimacy and convey messages about what should be regarded as dominant knowledge in the field. In this sense NQTs’ professional practices can be viewed as reflecting a set of messages about what counts as teacher knowledge within the field of newly qualified teachers.

Maton’s Legtimation Code Theory (LCT) offers a framework for analyzing how knowledge and ways of knowing are valued in different contexts by examining actors’ dispositions and the organizing principles for their practices (Maton & Chen, 2016). LCT’s concept of specialization codes is based on the idea that any knowledge practice is always oriented towards something and enacted by someone. Specialization codes can explain why some actors succeed in a field while others do not. Therefor they are useful for understanding how NQTs navigate the challenges of their first year in the profession, and for investigating the interplay between knowledge and the knower to identify which forms of professional knowledge are legitimized in NQTs’ narratives.

This paper is a part of a PhD project that investigates the development of newly qualified teachers’ (NQTs) professional knowledge in the transition from teacher education and into their first year in Danish public primary school. At the current stage of the project, three participants are being followed during their first year through ethnographic fieldwork (Maeder, 2018; Spradley, 1979), which includes participant observations, video observations, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews. Inspired by longitudinal ethnographic studies (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019) the teachers are followed through participant observation in their everyday work at the school approximately 2-3 days every second month, combined with one interview every second month throughout the first year. This paper draws on empirical material from interviews and field notes from participant observations and informal conversations. Based on these data the analysis seeks to make visible the structures that shape which forms of knowledge and which qualities are valued in the teaching profession within the field of newly qualified teachers. Participant observations are used to enable an examination of the NQTs’ actions in professional practice and to gain an understanding of the local context, culture, and conditions that they are part of (Buvik, 2024). Informal interviews (Spradley, 1979) have been conducted to gain insight into the teachers’ immediate considerations, allowing for an exploration of the relationship between what they articulate about the professional and what they actually do in their work. Semi-structured interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2015) have been carried out to trace the changes in how the teachers talk about their approach to the profession over time. The interview questions also include descriptive questions intended to elicit detailed accounts of concrete events, situations or experiences, serving as a tool for gaining access to tacit knowledge. The empirical data was first processed using a thematic analysis (Braun et al., 2024; Braun, 2006) based on the analytical question: Which characteristics of the teacher role are highlighted and regarded as valuable by newly qualified teachers? The identified themes were then related to the concept within LCT’s specialization codes through the development of a translation device. In LCT, translation devices function as tools for creating dialogue between theory and data. The analytical findings are used to discuss how changes occur in the NQTs’ knowledge practices during the first year. Specifically how changes occur in what newly qualified teachers orient themselves towards when articulating their professional practices.

The paper has examined changes in newly qualified teachers’ (NQTs) knowledge practices from their teacher education to their first year of employment in Danish primary schools. Drawing on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) the analysis explored which forms of knowledge and qualities are valued in the field of newly qualified teachers. LCT provides a lens for understanding why some actors succeed in a field while others do not. The expected outcome of the analysis was to identify how the specialization codes are expressed and changed as the NQTs articulate their understandings of the teaching profession throughout their first year. The analysis indicates that several of the same qualities valued in the teaching profession are already present during the teacher education. As students, the NQTs were oriented towards a teacher role in which individual qualities were viewed as essential for success. This orientation persists as they enter the professional, where the focus becomes “finding who you are as a teacher”. Qualities such as time management, flexibility, patience, as well as building strong relationships with pupils are highlighted as central to managing the demands of the profession. During their studies and at the beginning of their employment, the teachers were oriented towards more abstract forms of knowledge particularly regarding the teaching dimension of their work. However this orientation shifts over the first year. Gradually and in different ways the NQTs find themselves compelled to compromise their initial ideas about what constitutes good teaching in order to protect their own well-being within the structural conditions of their work, such as limited preparation time, responsibilities for pupil care, expectations around collegial collaboration and experiences of physical stress symptoms. The personal qualities required to navigate these challenges become central to managing the professional development during the early stages of NQTs’ careers.

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