CHAPTER 4

SUBJECTIVELY SPEAKING: ENGLISH PRIMARY TEACHERS’ CAREERS

JENNIFER NIAS

Cambridge Institute of Education, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge, CB2 2BX, U.K.

Abstract

This chapter begins with an ipsative critique of the author’s longitudinal research into the

professional lives and experience of about 100 English primary school teachers. It argues that

methodological simplicity encourages thoughtful ‘grounded’ analysis of interview data. This

idea is illustrated by reference to the concept of ‘career’. While many teachers appear to use the

term in its conventional, male-oriented, vertical sense. some (mainly married women) redefine

the concept in lateral terms, such as a congenial working life, opportunities for increased self-

esteem. personal development, or informal influence. Others treat teaching as one of several

‘parallel careers’. In all these cases a successful ‘career’ in teaching is interpreted subjectively rather than normatively.

My own research into teachers’ lives and life-histories has been dominated by accident and opportunity. During the 1970s I was a lecturer in a university School of Education in the United Kingdom, responsible for a one-year post-graduate Certificate in Education course for graduates (in any subject) who wished to teach children between 7 and 13 years old. Each year there was a substantial cohort of secondary students; the primary group numbered between 12 and 20 and worked in an isolated basement room in a large old building whose upper floors were inhabited by more prestigious courses. We all got to know one another well, and once individuals had begun teaching, they would often telephone, call or write, seeking reassurance, support and information from an interested, professionally knowledgeable colleague who did not have the control over their careers which was now vested in their headteachers or inspectors. When, one day, a woman who had been teaching for three years returned from many miles away to talk about her experiences and, in passing, exclaimed, “I do wish you could come and see what I am doing now!” I decided to spend a forthcoming sabbatical term visiting past graduates from this course and exploring with them the strengths and weaknesses of their training.

Within days of starting my enquiry I realized that my concern was not theirs. I thought that they would be able to reflect upon the long-term utility of their very brief professional education. Instead, however, they wanted to talk to me about their own experiences of

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teaching. So I abandoned my original intentions. reframed my key interview questions and started again. They talked, I listened. seldom interrupting except to prompt or to offer another line of enquiry. My methodology was simple to the point of naivcty. I had a list of about twelve key questions and a series of notebooks in which I wrote rapidly in a personal shorthand, recording verbatim whenever I could. These notebooks filled rapidly. Over twelve weeks I interviewed about 35 men and women in different parts of the UK. None of them talked for less than an hour and a half. and some for as long as five hours. They talked in their classrooms, at lunchtime and after school until the caretakers shut us out. and then in their own homes, in pubs, restaurants, railway stations, parks. The hunger that they all showed to reflect upon their lives as teachers in the presence of a neutral but friendly outsider appeared almost insatiable.

I began to realize that I had stumbled, almost unawares. upon a mine of rich data which could illuminate an area about which relatively little was apparently known. that is. about the subjective reality of being a teacher in the primary schools of England and Wales. I broadened my field of enquiry to take in an equivalent number of graduates from similar courses in institutions with which I had had no contact and, subsequently, over the next eighteen months, a further 24 graduates from my own course who had by this time been teaching for two years or who had changed, after at least two years in the classroom, from teaching into other careers (most often. into parenthood). Altogether. I interviewed YY people (30 men and 69 women).

At this point, the whole endeavor nearly ended. First, the boxes full of notes were inadvertently carted away from my office by over-zealous cleaners and I rescued them from the municipal rubbish tip only after a frantic and unsalubrious search. Second, I took a new job in a different part of the country and for a two further years was too busy and preoccupied to start the task of serious analysis. But the ideas which had begun to form during the period of data collection stuck in my mind and I mentioned them one day during a chance conversation with a colleague from a neighboring university. He asked me to share them with some teachers on an in-service course, one of whom was a teachers’ center warden. The latter in turn asked me to talk to other teachers and soon I started to receive requests for copies of my lecture. I began to realize that academics and professionals alike were interested in the issues raised by the teachers who had talked so eagerly to me about their lives, albeit several years before.

Over the next six years. in the intervals of a professional life already heavily committed to my own teaching, I nibbled into. chewed and began to digest the huge quantity of data which I had accumulated. My methods of analysis wet-c as crude and simplistic as my means of data collection had been. I used category analysis. the themes being suggested by the frequency with which particular ideas were mentioned, either specifically or through a denotative analogue. I ‘tested’ the validity of these themes only for internal consistency and in discussions with teachers or. increasingly, with fellow academics. Furthermore, because the resulting eight articles which trickled in the early IYXOs into the educational press were written piecemeal, they tended to lack a coherent theoretical stance. I was well into the fifth of them before I realized that a well-knit set of ideas, deriving from symbolic interactionism, was emerging as my main organizing device and explanatory tool. Two years later, a casual remark to an English publisher gave me the incentive, in the form of a contract for a book (Nias, IYSY), to work these ideas out fully and to present them in a closely argued. well-sustained form.

In the meantime. a decade had passed since my first interviews. At this point, the

Research on Teachers’ Professional Lives 393

professional interest which the published articles had begun to attract, together with my own continuing involvement with the in-service education of teachers, encouraged me to gather some longitudinal data. I had current or recent addresses for about a sixth of my interviewees, and through them or through previous addresses I contacted over half the original group. During 1985 1 conducted a second set of interviews with these people, most of them now well into their second decade of work. Like the first interviews, these were open-ended and loosely structured, but on this occasion, I tape-recorded and transcribed all but a few of them, and returned them to respondents for checking and clearance. Analysis of this set of data was as simple in approach and intent as it had been earlier on, but this time it was systematic and controlled. For example, I employed more rigorous criteria than I previously had done in defining categories and in ensuring that they were saturated or falsifiable, and I looked regularly at imagery and metaphor. Moreover, analysis took place over eighteen months, rather than eight years, so it was easier than it had been on the earlier occasions to hold in my head a developing theoretical framework and the arguments deriving from it. Further, the need to integrate this new material with that which had emerged from the earlier interviews and to present it all in a published form which would be accessible both to teachers and to academics forced me carefully to consider structure, form and style.

A Personal Critique

I have outlined the sequence of events which has led me more and more deeply over the past fifteen years into a study of primary teachers’ lives and careers because this story itself highlights what I feel to be both the weaknesses and the strengths of my research in this area. Among the former I would count: a crude and simplistic methodology; little protection against memory decay over a long period; heavy reliance on one form of data collection (i.e., semi-structured interviews); few controls on subjectivity in data collection, recording or analysis; unsophisticated methods for data analysis; lack of attention during the first interviews to the ethical rights of respondents; failure systematically to collect biographical data which might have revealed cohort influences and pointed me towards historical or structural interpretations as well as the socio-psychological one which I finally adopted. In short, judged by most of the accepted canons of qualitative research, my enquiry may be deemed naive, subjective and opportunistic.

Yet it also has its strengths. First, the simplicity of the research design and the relatively uniform format in which the data were presented freed me to concentrate upon what the teachers themselves had said. My experience as a supervisor and examiner of higher degrees has taught me that operating and justifying complex systems of data collection and analysis can become an end in itself, an excuse not to wrestle with the ideas embedded in the evidence. By contrast, I had to make sense of the testimonies I had collected or abandon the whole enterprise; I could not take refuge in the contemplation of methodological complexities. Second, the extent and quality of the information I collected challenged me to search for and eventually find connections and relationships between apparently isolated ideas. In seeking not to drown in the data, I found new ways of swimming. Third, the fact that I have worked for so long on the material, has enabled my ideas to grow slowly, though often painfully. They have emerged, separated, recombined, been tested against one another and against those of other people, been rejected, refined,

reshaped. I have had the opportunity to think a great deal during fourteen years about the lives and professional biographies of primary teachers and about their experience of teaching as work. At the same time, my own employment for the past eleven years, as an in-service teacher educator, has given me many opportunities to test my thinking against the perceptions and professional insights of teachers themselves, to defend and validate my emerging ideas in discussion with practitioners similar in gender. age, status and cxperiencc to those whom I interviewed. I am satisfied that, despite its methodological shortcomings. the picture which I have painted reflects the world which teachers themselves inhabit and yet helps them to see it and themselves within it in fresh ways. It has also gained the attention of academics.

During the past three years I have also been a participant observer in a primary school (Primary School Staff Relationships Project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council 1985-7; see Nias, Southworth. & Yeomans, 1589). This project. and its successor (Whole School Curriculum Development and Staff Relationships in Primary Schools, funded by ESRC 198%90), USC ethnographic methods to explore the workings of primary schools as organizations of adults and the relationships of teachers and nonteaching staff as colleagues. Although this research does not focus directly upon teachers’ professional biographies. the overlap between these topics and my other enquiry is obvious. Being involved simultaneously in two related pieces of research has enriched both, somctimcs by confirming central ideas such as the importance to teachers and headteachcrs of their self- image, at others by challenging or extending particular notions (c.g.. exactly how do teachers influence one another’s thinking?) It has been immeasurably beneficial to set the picture that teachers give in interviews of their own behavior and careers against a backdrop of fine-grained observation of their life in classrooms and schools.

An Example: Redefining ‘Career’

So far. I have reviewed my own work on primary teachers in England and Wales. drawing attention to its methodological limitations. but arguing that the ideas which have grown from it have been truly ‘grounded’ (Glaser bi Strauss, 1967) and have benefited from slow ripening in a challenging professional climate. I want now to illustrate this process with reference ot the concept of ‘carter’, arguing that in mid-career a considerable number of primary teachers, especially women, redefine the term. so that it comes to mean the extension of personal interest, learning and development rather than vertical mobility. Viewed this way. ‘career’ can mean not only progress up a short, narrow ladder but also movement around a web of temporary, short-term posts or the pursuit of ‘parallel’ occupations. Both of these are options which allow individuals to balance stimulation and the extension of professional skills against a lack of security and recognition. Used in this latter sense, it signifies a notion “linked to internal matters held dearly and closely, such as image of self and felt identity” (Goffman. 196X, p. llY), not to official position. It follows that whether individuals themselves see the opportunities provided by ‘alternative’ or ‘parallel’ careers as enriching or demeaning is a matter of subjective definition. So, two women, equivalent in age, marital status, degree of perceived financial need, professional status and experience can and do react very differently to the job opportunities which are available to them between the ages of aproximately 32 and 42 years. For a number, as yet unknown, of primary teachers, ‘career’ changes its meaning as they develop personally

Research on Teachers’ Professional Lives 39s

and in response to altering life-circumstances. Yet in neither the first nor the second interviews did I use the word ‘career’ in any of my questions. Instead I asked, for example, “How do you come to be here?“, “What plans have you for the future?“, “What changes would you like to see in your working conditions?”

My own understanding developed in the following ways. When in 1974-5 I interviewed 99 men and women who were, or had been, primary teachers for between two and ten years, I found that many of them did not see themselves as ‘teachers’, even though they had been employed in this capacity for several years and had established their professional competence in their own eyes and those of their colleagues. Those who saw themselves as ‘persons-in-teaching’, rather than as ‘teachers’ (a distinction which I have elaborated in Nias, 1989), did not envisage staying for very long in the occupation which they had initially chosen. As one said, “I’m a teacher now - not for always”. By contrast, most of those who did identify with their occupation saw their working futures in terms of a career which they conceptualized in the hierarchical terms traditional to English schooling.

Ten years later the picture had changed. I interviewed 47 people (17 men, 30 women) who were teaching. Of these, 36 were still teaching the age range for which they had trained; 7 of them (all women) were employed on short-term or part-time contracts. Of the 11 (4 men, 7 women) who had moved into other types of teaching, 2 (a man and a woman) were still seeking promotion, though in secondary schools; the remaining 3 men and 6 women were in adult education, in colleges of higher education or in advisory/support services. I confirmed that a further 2 men and 5 women whom I did not interview were also teaching outside mainstream primary education. Put another way, by mid-career, at least 24 women and 6 men (that is, about one third of the original number) had stepped, voluntarily or otherwise, off the direct career ladder as it exists in English primary schools. This number does not include 13 women who were at home with their own children and a further 16 people whom I could not trace. It represents, notwithstanding, a substantial minority of the total with whom I began.

At first 1 assumed that when my interviewees used the term ‘career’, they were employing it in its conventional sense;whether they looked towards the future or reviewed the past (Huberman, 1988). For example, they were very conscious of the limitations likely to be imposed upon their vertical mobility by demographic, economic and political changes which they had not envisaged when they had chosen to enter the profession 10-20 years before. Women had three particular concerns. Nine commented on the difficulty they had encountered, or were still attempting to overcome, in returning in any capacity to teaching after child-rearing (difficulties which are confirmed by Biklen, 1985, in the USA; Grant, 1986, and Acker, 1987, in the UK). Seven reported that they could get jobs only as ‘supply’ teachers or as part-time or temporary teachers. Eight more, already holding senior management posts, commented on the obstacles which women, especially those with children, faced in obtaining headships, while two Roman Catholics whose husbands had left them felt they no longer had any future in the voluntary sector of education, in which, they claimed, divorced women would not be promoted. In consequence, several women who perceived themselves as ‘having no promotion prospects in schools’ had moved or were hoping to move into teacher education. Yet, as one said,

If I had any real faith that, as a woman. I would have got a deputy headship, I would certainly have stayed in schools.

3Yf1 MICHAEL HUBEKMAN

That some people, notably women, accepted the vertical career structure of primary teaching, wished to be part of it and resented their apparent exclusion from it, is especially evident from the testimony of teachers on temporary or part-time contracts (that is. normally women who had moved to another part of the country and/or who had reentered the profession after child-rearing or a stay abroad). The majority of such people spoke about their experiences with disappointment, resentment or frustration. In particular they all considered that their previous experience was discounted by their new colleagues. A few put it mildly:

It is frustrating in a way hecausc once you‘ve lost your Scale 2 there’s no recognition made of the fact that you were deserving your promotion. You’re then back to where you started. it doesn’t count for anything.

Others were more overtly angry:

This joh ~ as a so-called ‘remedial teacher’ - is the only one’ I could get. And 1 had a Scale 3 for language in my last joh. So here I am doing things I don’t approve of and watching someone else do the language job here that I know I could do better. But no-one cfvcr asks you what you did hefore.

1 came here first as a supply teacher so no-one knows I was a deputy before 1 had my children They ncvcr ask, and if you’re a Scale I teacher you can’t tell them.

Yet. although in voicing such concerns my interviewees seemed to be expressing anxieties and frustrations about vertical mobility, I soon realized that they attached other meanings, too, to the lack of promotion opportunities which they perceived to lie ahead of them. In particular, they were less concerned about a relatively low income and restricted life-style than with the probable effects of nonadvancement upon their self- esteem and with associated constraints upon the development of their potential (as Connell. 1085; Sikes. 1986; Riseborough, 1986, also remarked of Australian and English secondary teachers in mid-career). Permanent, full-time teachers spoke with anxiety of “good people getting stuck”, of those who haven’t got promotion being “bitter and frustrated and worse teachers because of it”, of “good teachers losing heart because they have nowhere to go”. They wanted to take on additional responsibilities, to extend their spheres of influence. and were afraid that if their efforts continually met with lack of reward or recognition they would begin to put less into the job. For such teachers diminished promotion prospects appeared to relate much more closely to an expressed dread of professional stagnation than they did to material incentives.

The same was true of those with temporary or part-time jobs who found it hard to teach as they wanted to, to think of themselves as ‘real teachers’, to participate fully in the wider life of the school. Their most common complaints were being unable to reach the level of performance, for themselves or their pupils, to which they were accustomed and the frustration engendered by the resulting need to accept lower professional standards. As one woman recalled:

During the five years of part-time work, I kept on thinking. ‘One day it’ll be real again. One day 1’11 he doing the real thing.’ I suppose seeing so many people who don’t do it very well, you just keep thinking, ‘One day I’ll bc able to get hack in my own classroom and do my own thing and make a good job of it’.

Being unable to ‘make a good job of it’ was partly due to the constraints of time and space which their curtailed role imposed upon them. These constraints were, however, felt to be compounded by the attitude of some heads and classteachers who, my interviewees

Research on Teachers’ Professional Lives 397

bitterly commented, simply wanted them for what they called ‘child-minding’. For

example:

At some schools, they say, just go along and find something to do!’ That’s dreadful. I kept thinking ‘this is ridiculous. I’m being paid to do odd jobs’.

Nor did they feel they were seen as full members of their school staffs. Instead they perceived themselves as ‘on the periphery’, ‘just a spare part’, ‘filling in’. In consequence, they felt undervalued or excluded, either by default or because they were actually prevented from making a contribution to staff discussions. For example:

It’s frustrating in some ways _. At staff meetings 1 know that when we are discussing the curriculum it doesn’t really affect me as much as everybody else. But I think it shouldn’t be like that, because although I’m on temporary contract now, I’m still making a contribution and some of the things they’re planning in the curriculum depend on my being there. I don’t think that people mean to exclude you but you’re not taken into account the same as an ordinary member of staff and that’s quite difficult .__ Without meaning to, the staff are excluding you from the group.

The cumulative effect of employment under these conditions was a damaging loss of professional and personal self-esteem. Typical comments were:

My training and skills weren’t being used. I didn’t feel they were appreciated in supply teaching.. My self- confidence began to go.

When I was full-time. 1 was important to the kids, but (as a part-timer) I’m just somebody who comes in on Thursdays and they con? care about me.

I can remember that confidence 1 felt because I’d been (at the school) a long time and I knew all the staff, I knew the children and I knew the parents I would like that feeling back again, not so much that you’re important but that you are as important as everybody else.

To self-doubt was added a sense of injustice, for, as these teachers were quick to tell me, “I wouldn’t be doing much more work if I had a full-time job than I am in a part-time one”. As one reflected.

No-one seems to realize how much thought and effort goes into being a good supply teacher In a lot of ways, it’s harder than having a class of your own.

Done well, they said, temporary and part-time teaching involved flexibility, sensitivity,

vigilance and a great deal of preparation. Yet the circumstances in which they were required to teach tended to leave them feeling not just frustrated, deskilled, undervalued and impotent, but also lacking the affective and professional rewards of long-term involvement with children and with whole school development. No wonder they felt, as one said,

I wouldn’t consider doing part-time again, I would want to do full-time. And permanent too, if I could. I don’t want any more temporary posts. It’s just not worth it, if you’re keen on the job and want to do it well.

There is evidence then that the career attitudes of some primary teachers are shaped by traditional thinking. Both men and women want to move upwards, to posts carrying more status and financial recompense but, above all, more responsibility, the opportunity to learn fresh skills and the likelihood of enhanced self-esteem. Most of the people who felt this way held permanent, full-time posts and many were worried by what they saw as

39x MICHAEL HUBEKMAN

declining opportunities for promotion within the profession. A few had however stepped off the ladder in order to pursue a sequential career (normally, though not exclusively, in parenthood, see also Biklen, 1986; Evetts, 1988). All of them experienced frustration, self-doubt and lack of esteem when they attempted to reenter the system. Similarly, Biott (1988) found considerable discontent among English primary teachers who had moved sideways into temporary posts in curriculum support teams outside schools and who realized at the end of their period of secondment that there would be not vertical recognition for their increased knowledge and expertise. As Bethel1 (1980) points out, one of the limiting features of teaching as a career in the UK is the obstacles it presents to anyone who wants to opt in and out at different points, in accordance with the dictates of felt-needs for personal growth of refreshment.

‘Career’ as Personul Extension

But not all my interviewees appeared to see their careers in these predominantly negative terms. As I scrutinized their responses, it dawned on me that some (mostly women with children but also one single woman with no dependants) had made a virtue out of necessity. Disadvantaged, in terms of the single line vertical structure of teaching, by the multiple roles they carried, by the prejudice which existed against their promotion to senior posts in schools and by the mobility sometimes enforced upon them by their husbands’ jobs, they had redefined the concept of career to mean progressive opportunities for personal learning and extension. This they had done in two ways. First. the fact that some returned to teaching in roles which were peripheral to conventional classroom teaching gave them a good deal of freedom which they relished, as Ball and Goodson (1985) also noted among female secondary teachers. They appreciated the flexibility afforded by part-time or temporary work and the potential for personal and professional development offered by moves into, for example, theatre workshops, teaching English as a second language or work with children with special educational needs. Lyons and McCleary (1980) and Acker (1987) have noted the same trend, while Smith, Kleine, Prunty, and Dwyer (1986, p. 110) claimed of elementary teachers in the USA:

Beyond the self-contained classroom there exists a huge array of other options for teachers. Our (women) teachers found and created a number of those.

With the growth in the UK in the past few years of in-service education in school time and of support and advisory teams for primary schools, such options have further increased, creating a network of short-term opportunities. Within this network, information often appears to pass in the first instance by word of mouth, as Evetts (1987,1988) also suggests. An alternative structure exists, its potential recognized and exploited by some primary teachers. One put it this way,

Mine is hardly the accepted way of pursuing a career, but in terms of personal development and learning. I regard it as very satisfactory. I’m not concerned with status, which is fortunate, because both as a supply teacher and as a part-timer, I am always the lowest status person in the school. But during the past few years I’ve had a wonderfully wide range of experience, all of which has fed me. I’m very enthusiastic about the life I’ve chosen.

Research on Teachers’ Professional Lives 399

A second group of married women had returned after child-rearing to permanent, full- time posts in school. Reconciling themselves to the fact that they might not find the promotion they felt they deserved, they had however turned their energy, talent and enthusiasm to improving not just their own professional competence but also that of their less experienced colleagues (see Biklen, 1985, 1986, for similar American evidence). One in eight of my second interviewees named the person (other than their headteachers) who had most influenced their professional development as “a (married) woman in her 40s”. These were all either late entrants to teaching or ‘returners’. A similar woman involved in the Primary Schools Staff Relationships Project exerted a tremendous amount of school- wide influence. Reflecting on her failure to obtain a headship, she said that she had eventually realized that she did not need to pursue a conventional career path in order to fulfil her professional aims, that there was little that she wanted to achieve educationally that she could not bring about through her influence on others as a deputy (Nias, 1987). I came to see that some older women teachers are able to create a satisfying role for themselves in primary schools without becoming headteachers. They find they are able to exercise a profound influence on their colleagues while still remaining in the classroom. It is possible that Poppleton’s (1988) finding that women secondary teachers tend to experience more job satisfaction than men also reflects a similar trend.

‘Parallel Careers’

Once I had accepted that primary teachers do not all conceptualize ‘career’ in identical ways, it was possible to consider other alternatives too. Finley (1984) argues that secondary teachers in the USA who do not wish to, or cannot, move on create their own ‘careers’ in schools, by ensuring that they teach only those pupils with whom they feel comfortable. I also noted the tendency highlighted by studies of secondary teachers in English schools (e.g., Benet, 1983; Woods, 1984; Sikes, Measor, &Woods, 1985) for them to offset boredom or frustration in mid-career with the development of ‘parallel careers’, such as pottery, car repairs, market gardening or social or community work (paid or unpaid). Huberman, Grounauer, and Marti (1987) hint at the existence of such expedients among older teachers in Swiss secondary schools. Following Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechofer, and Platt (1968) I have called such people ‘privatized workers’, because the important part of their lives appeared to go outside school; it was evidently in their lateral roles that they found personal significance, self-esteem and self-extension. To be sure, I encountered only a few of them (in the first interviews three women and in the second, two men), but they stood out from among the others because they were neither attempting to obtain promotion within the school system nor seeking to extend their professional skills outside it. They appeared to consider that they had exhausted the possibilities, in terms of personal satisfaction and extension, which teaching was able to offer them; and they made it clear that it was only their domestic commitments which prevented them from leaving their jobs. However, the decision on the part of such teachers to pursue a parallel career carried its own problems with it, for the extent of the satisfaction they subsequently experienced seemed to depend upon their capacity to ‘juggle’ their competing interests (Pollard, 1982; Sikes et al., 1985; Spencer, 1986) or to build ‘bridging’ devices between them (Woods, 1981).

Parallel careers existed in another sense too. In both 1975-7 and 1985 I interviewed one

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or two people who were aware that their ‘two lives’ (as one put it, describing the dual centrality to him of teaching and family) had become unbalanced. Some, reacting to pressures in their personal lives, had transferred their attention temporarily away from classroom and school; others, by contrast, were seeking, or had sought refuge in school from domestic circumstances. First, there was the man who had previously been an enthusiastic teacher, but whose energy, at the time of interview, was channelled into his home life. Having not long before married a widow with three children, he said,

I know I’m not teaching as well as I could at the moment, hut the important thing to me just now is to make a success of being a stepfather everything else is second to that _._ I find it immensely satisfying. What I need to do is find a balance between the two.

Second was a group of three women and one man who had turned to work after marital breakdown because, as one said, “1 needed to find something 1 was good at again”. The man explained,

I coped by just working. For months I didn’t do anything else. Like a lot of people, I suppose, it was work that kept me going,

while a woman recalled:

I felt rejected 1 turned to something I knew I could succeed in and that was my job. Through that. my confidence improved.

It is possible to see these people too as pursuing a form of parallel career, treating home and school as separate but equally fruitful areas of personal development and switching between them at different times of their lives in response to the dictates of felt-need. They treat their multiple realities as complementary rather than competing; one ‘self’ is temporarily held in suspense while another comes to the fore. It is for reasons such as this that longitudinal enquiries are as necessary to an understanding of teachers’ professional biographies as are intensive cross-sectional studies. Work, after all, has to take its place alongside other life-age commitments. Subjectively viewed, career development is not likely to proceed in a straight line. Rather, one can predict that over a life-span the involvement of individuals with teaching will fluctuate as a factor of their satisfaction with it (however caused), and of the satisfaction and obligations attached to other roles.

To sum up, among the advantages of longitudinal studies of teachers’ lives and careers is the fact that they present the researcher with opportunities to reflect upon her data over a long period and, in the process, to reconceptualize particular notions, in line with the meanings attached to them by the speakers themselves. These advantages may be increased if methodological simplicity frees the researcher to think about the interpretation rather than the collection of her evidence. I began my enquiries into the subjective realities of English primary teachers nearly fifteen years ago. Though careful listening and critical scrutiny of my evidence, I became aware of the importance which such teachers attach to self-esteem. As they develop, as adults and as professionals, their self-referentiahsm takes on a chronological dimension. In reflecting upon their occupational futures and upon their experience so far, they begin to use the word ‘career’ and deliberately to apply it to themselves. Yet they do not all attach the same meanings to the term. Many use it in its conventional and, some (e.g., Biklen 1985; Evetts, 1988) would

Research on Teachers’ Professional Lives 40 I

argue, male-oriented sense, perceiving their careers to have been ‘broken’ or ‘interrupted’ by, for instance, service abroad or a period of child-rearing. For such teachers, ‘career’ is often experienced in negative terms, damaging to their sense of personal potential and self-worth. This feeling is also reflected in the comments of male and female teachers who came into the profession during a period of relative expansion and who now work in a much more constraining economic and political climate. However, others (predominantly married women), construe ‘career’ in lateral terms. Some of them choose, with a sense of fulfilment and self-determination, to move around a network of short-term posts, often peripheral to or outside mainstream classroom teaching; while others create satisfying roles for themselves within schools which enable them to grow professionally and to exercise considerable influence over their colleagues. Lastly, a minority of teachers, male and female, treat their jobs as one of several careers which they pursue in parallel, offsetting the frustrations of one life with the rewards (among them status and recognition) offered by another. One conclusion is clear: if we wish to understand the lives and perspectives of primary teachers in the United Kingdom, we must cease to define ‘career’ solely in terms of structured development and upward movement, and look instead at the varied senses in which women, in particular, understand, conceptualize and pursue their own careers.

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Biography

Jennifer Nias is Tutor in Curriculum Studies at the Cambridge Institute of Education, UK. She has taught, at various times and in different parts of the world, children from three to fifteen and adults from eighteen to fifty-six. Before moving to Cambridge in 1977, she was tutor to the Primary PGCE course at the Udiversity of Liverpool. Her present job involves participation in many kinds of in-service teacher education, mainly for primary and middle school teachers. Her research interests include the lives and careers of primary school teachers and inter-adult relationships in primary schools, especially as these relate to whole school curriculum development and implementation.