Routledge Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience: A socio-cultural and critical guide to action (Teacher Quality and School Development)

In Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience the stories of 60 graduate teachers are documented as they grapple with some of the most persistent and protracted personal and professional struggles facing teachers today. Narratives emerge detailing feelings of frustration, disillusionment and even outrage as they struggle with the complexity, intensity and immediacy of life in schools. Other stories also surface to show exhilarating experiences, documenting the wonder, joy and excitement of working with young people for the first time. This book makes sense of these experiences in ways that can assist education systems, schools, and faculties of teacher education, as well as early career teachers themselves to develop more powerful forms of critical teacher resilience. Rejecting psychological explanations of teacher resilience, it endorses an alternative socio-cultural and critical approach to understanding teacher resilience. The book crosses physical borders and represents experiences of teachers in similar circumstances across the globe, providing researchers and teachers with real-life examples of resilience promoting policies and practices. This book is not written as an account of the failures of an education system, but rather as a provocation to help generate ideas, policies and practices capable of illuminating the experiences of early career teachers in more critical and socially just ways at an international and national level. Review "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 This important book does much to confront the outdated and damaging way that they are conceptualised.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 JohnsonHarvard 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