"No one does it for these kids" : trajectories into the profession of early career teachers

Initial teacher education tends to be approached as a systematic process of acquisition of professional skills, knowledge and understanding. Internationally, there have been increasing moves towards accountability frameworks that delineate and anatomise discrete dimensions of the profession and that require beginning teachers to incorporate standards descriptors into their repertoires of professional "technologies of the self" (see for example, AITSL 2014). Standards frameworks that homogenise and universalise experience are key components of performativity regimes in education (Ball 2008; Stronach 2010). Teacher quality is central, with governments identifying high quality candidates into initial teacher education, and quality measures on graduation, as key components of the quality agenda (see for example, NSW Government 2013). This chapter argues that rather than the neat incremental and developmental throughline assumed by regulatory frameworks, employers, politicians and media commentators, the trajectory of new graduates into the profession is a contingent process of fits and starts, realignments and readjustments, often "crisis-ridden, epiphanic, unpredictable and reversible" (Stronach 2010, 107). These context-specific trajectories are as unpredictable for "high quality" graduates as they are for any aspiring teachers. Aspirations are constantly recalibrated in response to affectively volatile events in the present, memories of the past and imagined futures. This chapter maps minute calibrations and adjustments to emerging professional identity by tracing affective, material and relational flows in the narrative accounts of three high achieving beginning English teachers. Particular narrative tropes - such as the "heroic" teacher - give additional insights into how they make sense of their experiences. Their narratives also draw attention to how new teachers in the present make "affective bargains" (Berlant 2011) with the future that may divert them away from disadvantaged schools where high quality graduates are most needed.