In this presentation, we share key insights from a broader research project examining homeroom teachers’ knowledge, learning processes, and professional identities. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with 142 homeroom teachers working in elementary (n = 60), middle (n = 32), and high schools (n = 50) in Israel. The guiding research question asks what homeroom teachers learn through their everyday work in schools, and how they learn to become homeroom teachers while simultaneously developing their professional identities. The study is informed by a practice-based approach to organizational knowledge and learning (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), which conceptualizes knowledge and learning as embedded in practice, inseparable from action, and situated within specific social and organizational contexts. We present two sets of findings. First, we examine homeroom teachers’ distinctive forms of practice-based knowledge, particularly their expertise in care work developed in their everyday work in schools. This care expertise comprises four interrelated forms: intuitive work, relational work, emotional work and sensory work (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2023). We will specifically focus on how homeroom teachers learn to develop loving feelings towards their students through proactive learning activities, and how they mobilise this emotional capital in their everyday practice (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2025a). Second, we explore homeroom teachers’ professional identity formation. We show how teachers engage in identity work (Brown, 2022) and boundary work (Langley et al., 2019) to construct and sustain their professional identities, and how these processes are shaped by the spatial and temporal dimensions (Hirst & Humphreys, 2020). Our findings highlight how homeroom teachers draw on meaningfulness of their work to constitute their professional identity in the face of public criticism towards teachers and the teaching profession (Sapir & Mizrahi‐Shtelman, 2024), and how they engage in boundary work to form and define their professional group, employing adaptable boundary work strategies, tailored to their interactions with different key stakeholders (Mizrahi-Shtelman & Sapir, 2025). Finally, we will situate homeroom teachers’ identity formation processes within the spatial and temporal structures of schools (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2025b).

Brown, A. D. (2022). Identities in and around organizations: Towards an identity work perspective. Human Relations, 75(7), 1205–1237. Feldman, M. S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization science, 22(5), 1240-1253. Hirst, A., & Humphreys, M. (2020). Finding Ourselves in Space: Identity and Spatiality. In The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations, edited by A. D. Brown, 698–714. Oxford: Oxford University Press Langley, A. et al. (2019). Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations: From Cartography to Process. Academy of Management Annals, 13: 704–36. Mizrahi-Shtelman, R., & Sapir, A. (2025). Navigating boundaries: the evolution of homeroom teachers’ profession through professional boundary work. Journal of Professions and Organization, 12(2), joaf001. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2023). Experts in care: homeroom teachers, care work and the development of practice-based care expertise. Educational Review, 76(6), 1581-1600. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi‐Shtelman, R. (2024). ‘We are not babysitters’: Meaningfulness and meaninglessness in homeroom teachers' identity work. European Journal of Education, 59(4), e12714. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2025a). How love works: exploring the meanings and expressions of love in educators’ work in primary and secondary education. Teachers and Teaching, 1-19. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2025b). Becoming a homeroom teacher: spatial and temporal dimensions of identity formation. Research Papers in Education, 40(3), 442-466.