It's Just Research Podcast, Season 2, Episode 5: The everyday performance of teaching

Dr Sarah Steadman is a lecturer in English Education and the Programme Director for the PGCE courses that are offered by the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London.

Dr Steadman’s research into teacher identity came as a lucky accident when she embarked on her doctoral study in 2016 at King’s. Although she intended to focus on the experience of learning to teach in three specific routes into teacher training, she was struck by the way teacher identity was embedded into all forms of teacher training but so scarcely researched. She noticed that any existing literature on teacher training largely missed out the lived experience of the trainees themselves – instead focussing on programme directors and course providers as opposed to those who were learning. Sarah then sought to fill this gap.

It soon became clear to Dr Steadman that she wanted to explore the lived experiences of trainee teachers in the U.K. and therefore went on to follow three trainees in these three specific routes for a year to see how their teacher identity developed and was contested throughout their time on their respective courses.

Dr Steadman describes teaching as an incredibly emotive and social experience and therefore can be taxing on your sense of self. ‘We put ourselves on the line every time we step in front of a class of kids’, she says. Hosts Sara and Liam, who are also teachers, compare the experience of being teacher to being an actor, except an actor is rarely expected to perform for 7 hours a day for most of the year in front of the same audience and also be held so accountable for that audience too.

In a professional climate that is coming under increasing pressure from policymakers, Dr Steadman emphasises that teacher identity must be at the forefront of teacher training, especially to combat the issues of teacher recruitment and retention. She notes that we are seeing a leaning towards a certain type of teacher in England, but highlights that teaching is an incredibly individualistic vocation and the way one teaches cannot be prescribed. She describes teaching as intersectional and contextual – no one way of teaching is applicable nor appropriate in every context and each of these teaching spaces is affected by many and sometimes unpredictable variables such as place, time, size, and participants, and exacerbated in extreme cases witnessed during the pandemic.

Throughout the episode, Liam, Sara and Sarah discuss the difficulties teachers face in their trainee experiences, the effects of transition, the importance of teacher’s agencies and what’s to be said about the resilience of the profession throughout crises.