Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience

"The book endorses an alternative socio-cultural and critical approach to understanding teacher resilience and to promoting resilience promoting policies and practices. A valuable book which should inform teaching at all levels, from students, through to practising teachers and up to administrators." - Sarah Brew, Parents in Touch

Early career teachers have often been represented in deficit terms. This important book does much to confront the outdated and damaging way that they are conceptualised. Influenced by van Manen's work on critical practice, the book is based on a five year research study of sixty Australian early career teachers. The authors explore how their construct, 'socio-cultural, critical teacher resilience,' can enable teachers new to the profession to develop a balance between their own emerging professional identities and the expectations of others in the current over-regulated neoliberal contexts in which they must work . A real strength of the book is its grounding in the personal narratives of many early career teachers. It should be essential reading for politicians, policy makers, teacher educators, teachers, pre-service teachers and community leaders.

Robyn Ewing
University of Sydney

The new teacher’s plight is often seen as stressful, and lonely—a reality that individuals are expected to bear on their own. Sadly, some sink, while others swim. However, from a different perspective—one that highlights the organizational, social, and political factors that shape a new teacher’s experience—the teacher’s success depends largely on the context in which she works. An individual who succeeds in one setting might well fail in another. With rich case studies and thoughtful analysis, Promoting Early Teacher Career Resilience, makes a compelling case for shifting reformers’ attention to the school as a workplace, thus ensuring success for many more novices.

Susan Moore Johnson
Harvard Graduate School of Education

A book with a powerful and hopeful perspective on teacher socialization: understanding early career teachers’ resilience as that outcome of thoughtful negotiations between themselves –their sense of identity, passion, commitment, expertise- on the one hand and the organizational and institutional realities of the school system on the other. By rejecting resilience as a personality trait, the authors move away from blaming the individual and manage to restore the emancipatory and professionalizing potential of the concept. Resilience is not just about bouncing back, but also bouncing forward: developing professional stamina for sustainable and committed educational practices in the teacher career.

Geert Kelchtermans
University of Leuven

Teachers everywhere have been under pressure and under scrutiny, their work has been subject to constant reform, they are increasingly positioned as classroom technicians. This book addresses a different teacher - the teacher as intellectual, as autonomous moral actor. It works to create a space, a set of possibilities, within which teachers can think. It is a thoughtful, powerful and necessary book - but also a very practical and relevant one. Every new and would-be teacher should read it.

Stephen J Ball FBA AcSS
UCL