As we tentatively emerge from the imposed isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and as the status quo reasserts itself, it seems timely to consider the current state of teacher professionalism. This task seems critical, given the wider backdrop of the neoliberal policy pandemic that has driven the commodification and instrumentalization of education…

This paper draws on findings from a wider project examining "relational pedagogies" within Australian secondary schools. The paper considers the growing use of the "relationships" concept as a descriptor of specific teaching practices. Normative descriptions of "relationships" (and concordant descriptions of…

Uncertainty is a key feature of philosophising with children. It is central to the theory and methodology of philosophical inquiry and the educational assumptions underlying it. Uncertainty also presents a specific challenge for pupils and teachers undertaking philosophical inquiry in the classroom, because mainstream education is mostly based on…

Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) are often required to place a high priority on the value of respect within their first year as a beginning teacher. The practice of respect is a central issue within the educational discourse (Mills 2020) and mentor teachers of NQTs have a vital role in cultivating and problematising their understanding of respect.…

In this article, I analyse non-Dalit teachers' outlooks by positioning them within a culturally complex caste system, considering its influence on Dalits' education. Nepalese society is ruled by a caste system, where non-Dalits--Brahmins and Kshatriya are considered pure and powerful, and Dalits are viewed as impure and powerless. This…

Drawing on Sen's notion of social justice in the Capability Approach, this paper examines the experiences of a group of novice teachers from English teacher education programmes working in marginalised schools in Chile. Through open-ended surveys and interviews, I investigated how new teachers navigate their first teaching years in contexts of…

The article discusses parent-teacher relationships in school micropolitics based on beginning teachers' stories. We employ a narrative approach and investigate how micropolitical conditions and strategies are portrayed in beginning teachers' stories of parent-teacher relationships. The research material consists of narrative interviews with seven…

In this endeavour to examine teachers' willingness to discuss controversial political issues in class, we focused on four variables that received little attention so far: teachers' vested interest, knowledge, the topic of discussion, and teachers' ethnicity. 1130 teachers in Israel, 832 Jewish and 298 Arab, answered an online questionnaire that…

Fostering the development of the required knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for teachers to be successful in the classroom is a complex task. Teacher candidates must develop the skills needed to make 'professional decisions that lead to favorable student outcomes' (Warren, 2018, p. 169). There are many moments within a school day when…

Early career teacher (ECT) attrition data are often challenged by those outside of the profession. Attrition rates can only be interpolated from existing data, but fall somewhere between 8 and 53%. The Australian workforce data on ECT attrition are problematized at the outset, before presenting a collective case study examining early career male…

This study explores how two language teachers constructed and reconstructed their professional identities through their action research (AR) facilitated by university researchers in China. Informed by the theory of 'community of practice', the findings of the study show that AR exerted a transformative impact on the teachers' identity development.…