The complexity of three primary teachers’ professional lives in England: Examining how identities form and morph through early motivations and the highs and lows of teaching

Ten per cent of the teaching workforce leave the profession annually and retention is affected by accountability pressures. Early Career Teachers (ECTs) need support to overcome professional challenges. Intrinsic factors that keep teachers motivated during challenges include altruistic reasons such as working with children, contributing to communities, and cognitive fulfilment. Extrinsic factors include motivators such as pay and conditions, job security and career status, which are important to teachers.

My research listened to the perceptions and experiences of three primary classroom teachers in England, working in different primary schools during their early careers. I aimed to understand what motivated the ECTs to go into teaching, to appreciate their experiences, and to examine what challenges they encountered in their school context, and what had supported them in overcoming professional challenges.

The methodological framework used interviewing, a Life-History (Goodson and Sikes, 2001) and a semi-structured approach, to gather ECTs' first-hand narratives. The narratives enabled me to appreciate ECTs' experiences and understand how their identities changed over time. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 1987) structured the analysis of the narratives and revealed complex social, political, historical and cultural lives rooted in their sense of self and personal value. Sense of self was impacted by multiple aspects including organisational factors.

The findings show that teachers’ lives are complex; tensions play out differently for individuals in different primary school contexts. Despite the challenges, teachers hold onto their early professional aspirations. The relationships with more knowledgeable others, the mentors, were crucial to support the teacher’s different needs and helped in navigating the formal and informal rules of school life. Tensions occurred because of fractious relationships with a range of education stakeholders. During the interviews, the ECTs described hierarchies of power and recognised a gap between their aspirations and expectations of others amidst social, cultural, historical, political, personal, and organisational aspects.

The research furthers the debate about supporting ECTs’ aspirations and ongoing professional development to keep them motivated and satisfied in their careers. I discovered that ECTs have multiple identities that morph throughout their early careers and support them in dealing with the challenges within the dynamic environment of a primary school. Researchers who have used linear or two-dimensional frameworks have difficulty adequately demonstrating the complexities of teachers' lives. I offer a three-dimensional visualisation that demonstrates how social, cultural, historical, political, personal, and organisational aspects interact dynamically with ECTs’ identities that morph under the influence of these aspects.