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Over the past decade, teacher induction research has increasingly emphasized the need to support early-career teachers (ECTs) in navigating the organizational aspects of the teaching profession, particularly in high-need urban schools (Johnson et al., 2012). However, there remains a gap in research exploring the interaction between ECTs, their organizational context, and the broader urban environment, as well as how this interplay influences their overall induction process (März & Kelchtermans, 2020). To address this, our study adopts a non-deficit and multidimensional perspective on the teacher induction process (Mukamurera, 2018) and develops a conceptual framework combining the concepts of “professional self-understanding” (Kelchtermans, 2009), “urban education” (Gadsden & Dixon-Román, 2017; Welsh & Swain, 2020) and “working conditions” (Kelchtermans, 2007). We followed the induction experiences of 7 ECTs throughout their first year in the teaching profession within an urban context (i.e., Brussels). Following ECTs surrounded by diverse working and employment conditions (e.g., different employment contracts, with some working full-time at one organization and others working part-time at multiple schools), this paper addresses two research questions: 1) How do ECTs experience their induction into the contextual dimensions of the teaching profession? 2) How can these experiences be explained by the interaction between ECTs’ professional self-understanding and their organizational and urban contexts? Data were collected through longitudinal qualitative interviews (Hermanowicz, 2013) as part of an ongoing three-year narrative study involving two cohorts of approximately 10 ECTs each. This paper presents findings from the first year of the study, focusing on the first cohort, with interviews conducted at the beginning and the end of the school year. The results highlight specific ways in which ECTs interact with and are influenced by the broader contexts in which their teacher induction takes place. Moreover, the findings unravel how the process of teacher induction is the result of an interplay between structure (i.e., both organizational and urban contexts) and ECTs’ agency.
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Colignon, A., März, V., & Van Nieuwenhoven, C. (2024). The school matters: A longitudinal qualitative study on teacher induction in Belgian urban schools. European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), Nicosia (Cyprus). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/267980