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…

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…

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.…

The development of teacher professional learning communities (PLC) has attracted growing attention among practitioners, policy-makers and researchers. The aims of this study were to identify typologies of professional learning teams based on measures of professional learning engagement, and assess their linkages with teachers' value orientations.…

The present study focuses on the way novice teachers, who are part of a one-year postgraduate diploma in post-primary teaching, have opted to negotiate their status as school teachers. In particular, it asks why novice teachers prefer to hide as they scramble to learn how to teach. On the basis of three separate interviews spaced out though the…

A school subject leader (SL) is formally considered to make a difference in the educational system as a leader of a professional learning community, being responsible for the efficient and effective performance of the subject department. Since the department entails frequent and significant interactions among teachers, and organizational…

Authority, a fundamental part of the teaching-studying-learning process, is a problematic and poorly understood component of classroom life. It can be said, in practical terms, that pedagogical authority is constructed in classrooms, in teacher-student interaction and in the spirit of their physical presence, confidence, appreciation,…