(a) Background/context
Given the uncertainties of school settings, a beginning teacher’s first year of practice, post-graduation, is well recognised as a particular and inherently complex professional phase. Immersed in complex social relations and sophisticated professional roles within established school communities, whilst simultaneously making sense of what it means to be a teacher (Sela & Harel 2019; McCaw 2021), it is unsurprising that Smagorinsky et al. (2003) borrow Vygotsky’s (1987) metaphor of the ‘twisting path’ to characterise the process of learning to teach.
(b) Research aim/objectives
As scholars increasingly view uncertainty as something to sustain, as it leads to a richer understanding of organisational life, and because of the learning affordances it offers (Weick 2015; Packard & Clarke 2020), one such ‘twisting path’ journeyed by beginners is chosen for exploration in this study. This involves researching the evolving sense of the uncertainty of teaching among nine beginning primary teachers, during the course of their initial year of occupational experience, post-graduation. Guiding this study is a belief that the uncertain character of teaching allows for beginners’ beliefs and practices to be challenged and readapted during the course of their initial year of practice.
(c) Methods and data sources
Data, in the form of anecdotal narratives of lived experience, was collected through individual conversational interviews with the nine research participants (Forghani-Arani 2019; Swain & King 2022). Anecdotes are understood here as narrative accounts of situations and episodes, experienced by the participating beginning teachers; six females and three males, who worked in nine separate schools. Tantamount to the analytic technique of ‘pattern-matching’ (Yin 2006), cross-case analysis was used to identify common patterns that recur across the nine cases. Anonymity arising from the use of pseudonyms means that no identifying information is attached to collected data (Mertens 2010).
(d) Key findings/takeaway points
Data are drawn upon to substantiate conclusions that uncertainty is a core aspect of the work of beginning teachers. In charting the ‘twisting path’ journeyed by beginners, two interrelated experiential themes are apparent.
(a) Beginners’ experience of the organisational functioning of their school; and,
(b) Beginners’ experience of the unpredictability of the core components of classroom practice.
To adequately prepare teachers for the complex, shifting, and challenging contexts that teachers work with, greater attention in teacher education to the inquiry-based, improvisational dimensions of teaching can help critique the foundations of learning to teach and confront a tendency to perfect the practice of teaching.