The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified preexisting challenges for educators as manifested in high rates of work-related stress and burnout, and educators leaving the profession in higher numbers than ever before. In this article, we highlight the urgency for work-related well-being supports for educators, with a particular focus on system changes.…

Each year, SC TEACHER administers the SC Teacher Exit Survey to public K-12 classroom teachers who are not renewing their teaching contracts. The survey is designed to offer insights into how working conditions and other factors relate to teachers' decisions to either teach in another school district or leave the classroom. This report highlights…

LGBTQ+ teachers are an understudied and overlooked population in educational research, especially in the nascent field of international teacher studies. International teachers must contend with new kinds of precarity than they are used to in their home countries, and these kinds of precarity are more threatening to LGBTQ+ and BIPOC teachers. This…

Workplace bullying is a known issue in society, and is most prevalent in education. Nevertheless, teacher-on-teacher bullying is a taboo topic of discussion. Bullying is repeated acts or verbal comments made to the victim as a way of controlling and demonstrating power over the individual. These acts could cause a multitude of psychological or…

Over recent years there has been a raft of literature drawing attention to the inequity of working conditions for those in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector in England; however, it remains rare that we have the opportunity to hear the voices of the practitioners telling their own story. Through an online anonymous survey, we…

In this paper, we examine how evolutions related to the fragmentation of labour markets, the flexibilisation of work and employment conditions, and the multiplication of teacher training models and teachers' roles in schools, are contributing to reshaping teachers' careers. Drawing on interviews with teachers and senior leaders from 8 schools in…

The OECD teachers' occupational well-being framework contributes to understanding and measuring the occupational well-being of teachers between and within systems. It provides a pathway to explore the association between the quality of working environments and teachers' levels of occupational well-being. It also covers the association of teachers'…

Burnout is a significant problem that continues to plague the teaching profession. In this essay, I argue that the burnout of early-career teachers is not solely a function of personal factors (e.g., their knowledge, their beliefs, their pedagogical skills, their commitment to the teaching profession) but also a function of the organizational…

This article employs five teacher autobiographies in an attempt to examine their contribution to the history of teaching in Ireland. The article argues that such autobiographies provide significant insights into the history of the classroom and often represent subversive and disruptive narratives. As such they represent a valuable but overlooked…

Adult educators are often concerned with the well-being of our students, but how often do we consider our own quality of work-life? The purpose of the discussion session this paper is based on was to provide a safe space for participants to "Gripe and Grow." Participants were invited to share issues (gripe) that negatively affect their…

The collection of papers presented in this issue of Critical Studies in Education adds to the expansive body of work on teachers and teaching. Collectively, the papers draw our attention to new ways the field is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. With this editorial…

Do teachers spend more time on actual teaching and learning in a typical lesson compared to previous years? Do they feel prepared to teach when they start teaching? What sort of continuous professional development programmes do they participate in and how does it impact their practice? This report looks first at how teachers apply their knowledge…

This article is an ethnodrama playscript that examines the role of positionality in an interdisciplinary general education program called University Studies at Portland State University. Drawing from both the literature and from the practice of critical reflection, the authors share their experiences as faculty members relative to their…

This report compares average rates of frequent teacher absence (more than 10 days) for teachers with and without union or union-like contracts in traditional public schools and charter schools. The study's rationale is that such absences substantively harm students and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. It finds that teachers contractually…

According to Fanny Law Fan Chiu-fun, the former Permanent Secretary for Education and Manpower, the most significant education policy in recent years in Hong Kong was undoubtedly the new academic structure commonly known as "334." As schools, universities, and the community at large seemed to accept the new academic structure in…