Keywords

Introduction

The question of how beginning teachers ‘do good’ in their everyday practice in hard-to-staff schools is at the forefront of the La Trobe University Nexus Program. Nexus is an employment-based pathway into secondary teaching designed to recruit, prepare, support, and graduate high-achieving teachers into socio-culturally diverse and low socioeconomic schools in Victoria, Australia. Nexus teachers have clear ideas about how they “should live in the world, and about the kind of world they should aim to establish” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 27). In this chapter, we ask four Nexus teachers in their first year of teaching to think about: What is the ‘good life’ they want their students to achieve, and what is the ‘world worth living in’ they hope to mirror in their teaching? By considering stories of everyday teaching practices, we draw conclusions about how a personal orientation to ‘living well’ influences our teachers’ capacity to ‘teach well’ amidst the realities of schooling in contemporary times. The chapter is informed by research carried out at the end of school term one in 2022, 12 weeks into the Nexus teachers’ new careers. We start the chapter by briefly discussing the Nexus Program and the context of the research project. In the second part of the chapter, we draw on Nexus teachers’ discussions and case stories of living well and teaching well to provide an insight into pedagogical praxis-in-action. In the third part of the chapter, we use the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014; Mahon et al., 2017) to explore the arrangements of the classroom and the school that enable and constrain the Nexus teachers’ abilities to teach well. In the end, in the light of these conditions, we discuss how beginning teachers recognise and find hope in teaching for a world worth living in.

The Nexus Program: A Pathway to Teaching

Nexus is a federally funded and state supported employment-based pathway into secondary teaching working with low socioeconomic schools across Victoria, Australia.Footnote 1 Under the La Trobe University School of Education banner, we recruit and mentor high-achieving candidates from professions other than teaching who have a strong commitment to social justice principles and want to work in hard-to-staff schools. We specifically target potential teachers from diverse or historically ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds (Indigenous, low socioeconomic, culturally, or linguistically diverse) and highly sought-after teaching areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Languages). While completing their Master of Teaching studies, Nexus teachers are based in schools during their candidature as Education Support Class Employees (teacher aides) for one day a week in school term two, and two days a week in school terms three and four. Their salary is paid for by the Victorian Department of Education. At the end of the first year, we apply for their Permission to TeachFootnote 2 to take over their own classroom from term one through to term four in the following year as paraprofessionals. The salary for this year is provided by the school.

Context of the Research Project

In February 2022, four beginning teachers from the Nexus Program were invited to engage in virtual reading circle conversations to discuss the paper What is educational praxis? (Mahon et al., 2020). Opportunities were then provided over the following months to explore links between living well and teaching well in their classroom practice during three informal get togethers. These sessions involved the researchers and the Nexus teachers engaging in reflective conversations where reactions, feelings, and thoughts about everyday experiences (and what influenced these) were shared. In May 2022, the teachers engaged in semi-structured interviews to further unpack their stories. These conversations were guided by the key questions:

  • What does living well mean for you as a beginning teacher?

  • How has this notion of living well influenced how you teach?

  • Can you share some stories from this past term of teaching well in action?

  • What conditions in your school have constrained this way of teaching?

  • What conditions in your school have enabled this way of teaching?

Education for Living Well

A praxis approach to education advocates for teachers to take a critically reflective approach to practice which “takes a view about how people should live in the world, and about the kind of world they should aim to establish” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 27). Our view of praxis draws upon an understanding of both a neo-Aristotelian view (what is the right thing to do in the here-and-now based on practical wisdom) and a Marxian view (what are consequences for my students and how does this change history) (Mahon et al., 2020). For Nexus teachers, praxis involves morally informed and committed actions in their everyday teaching practice; and secondly, it helps to shape the social formations and conditions that make their collective work historically significant (both for the profession and for the low socioeconomic communities they serve) (Kemmis, 2010).

Below, the four teachers explore what it means to live well.

For Nexus teacher Michael,Footnote 3 living well is “about being well; finding your place in the world; those intangible psychological attributes that you call upon to be in the world in a way that you feel like where you are is in a harmonious relationship with the world.” Before joining the Nexus Program, Michael was living in Canada and studying a Doctor of Philosophy in Geography. Claire has a background in the Arts, spending the 10 years before Nexus working in communication roles in Melbourne, London, and San Francisco. She adds that “living well exists in the quality of your relationships; reciprocity, caring, loving, giving, receiving; having relationships in your community, feeling a sense of belonging, and being able to add value and give back.” Ben views it as knowing “what it is to be human; not just being a tool in an economic machine…it’s about critical thinking, understanding other people, where actually being human is important.” His life before teaching involved working in refugee camps in the Middle East, interning with an Australian Member of Parliament, and delivering emergency assistance after natural disasters. And Tim, with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, explains it as “about being happy, independent, productive. It’s about having options so you can do whatever it is you want to do in the world.” Together, these ideas of living well support the double purpose of education, a view that orients towards both the good for each person (the individual) and the good for humankind (the collective) (Kemmis et al., 2014). This praxis-oriented view of education frames the teacher’s task as:

[o]n the one hand, it aims to form and develop individuals with the knowledge, capabilities and character to live good lives – that is, lives committed to the good for humankind. On the other hand, education aims to form and develop good societies, in which the good for humankind is the principal value. (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 2)

Thinking about living well challenges beginning teachers to turn a mirror back onto themselves as educational practitioners; providing licence for them to explore beyond the intentionality of their work (what their immediate goals are) to the justness of their own practices (where all students succeed because inequities in classroom opportunities have been redressed). In this way, beliefs about education are formed for these new teachers not only as a philosophical undertaking, but also in the moment-by-moment unfolding of their work in the enactment of pedagogical praxis (Edwards-Groves et al., 2018). As praxis-oriented teachers, they look beyond acting as ‘technicians of practices’ to responding to the circumstances and the particular needs of their students for the good of the individual and the collective (Edwards-Groves & Grootenboer, 2015). Their descriptions of teaching well are summarised below.

Michael explains that his role in the classroom is to “help kids live well by finding their relationship with the world in a way that works for them. In my teaching, I hope to build student capacity to see through their initial impressions of the world; to see what’s going on under the surface in their communities; to go beyond the surface and question taken-for-granted assumptions.” In his lessons, Tim aims to make space for “students to be whoever they are; get them to think critically about their learning. Does this make sense? Why do we think that? What does that mean outside of this classroom? Where could this be used?” Ben spends “a lot of energy trying to build aspiration in my students; building cultural capital as a pathway to building aspiration; trying to give them a broader perspective on life in general.” And Claire views teaching well as anchored “in the relationships I have with the students; being a role model, being a consistent adult in their lives who shows up.”

From a Nexus beginning teacher’s perspective, teaching well is far more than a technical or instructional matter; rather it has moral, social, and political dimensions that are embedded in decisions around what is ‘good’ for their students based on the student’s relationships with others. For them, success as a teacher is not merely measured by high stakes testing results, standardisation, or normalisation. Instead, it emerges from an understanding of praxis that makes a difference to the life trajectories of the students they teach and the worlds they live in.

Case Stories of Teaching Well

The following case stories contain statements from semi-structured interviews and have been written in collaboration with the four Nexus teachers. Michael teaches regionally in a hard-to-staff secondary school where he prioritises classroom practices that encourage students to scrutinise their work by continually challenging and connecting the value of classroom tasks to learning; Claire also teaches in a regional senior college where she aligns her teaching with role modelling and fostering a growth mindset in her English students; Ben talks about a new way of teaching English he has adopted in response to his students’ low levels of literacy at a regional middle years college; and Tim works in a small rural school and actively seeks to understand what motivates his students so he can identify drivers to pull them through difficult senior curriculum content. In a time of constant change, they each consider what constitutes teaching well in their everyday pedagogical practices. The purpose here is to explore the everyday accounts of teaching well through a praxis lens to highlight the significance of this taken-for-granted aspect of pedagogical decision-making for beginning teachers. We build on the work of Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer (2015) in English education to provide accounts of praxis-in-action that make visible how Nexus teachers act for the good of their students and the good of their futures. Here are their stories.

Michael’s Story: Feedback

I would characterise my school as having a focus on inclusion and wellbeing. It has a lower socioeconomic profile and can be a challenging place to work. The school places a huge emphasis on finding pathways for students out of school, often non-academic pathways. I see my role as that of helping kids find their relationship to the world in a way that works for them. I value a sense of curiosity. I find myself defending what we learn on the basis of it just being really interesting. And I’d like that disposition to be taken up by my students: a love of learning for its own sake.

One thing I try to do in my classroom is support students by building their capacity to be masters of their own learning. I’ve tried this term to give them extra feedback; giving my own responses to their work and then providing space for them to write about their strengths, what they need to work on, and what they are going to do next. It’s about cultivating the idea that they are actually in a relationship with their work and the teacher, that they need to think about their habitual patterns of thinking. For many students without a lot of educational capital, these are completely unfamiliar challenges, arbitrary burdens rather than skills for life. Quite often my students will say: I don’t even want to look at this work. Or, I hate it. Or, what’s the point of this, I’m never going to use this in my life. That’s the type of thinking I want to defeat. I don’t want students to feel like they are just going through the motions. It is intrinsically valuable.

Beyond instrumentalised learning, what gets in the way of this is the incredible administrative bloat that overcomes teaching, like constantly filling out minor bureaucratic requirements and the whole compliance structure. It is a shock, and it really has been dispiriting. Then there’s the constant changes to the school schedule when the tempo of the day is thrown off by unplanned things; some of them important, some of them random or unexplained. Everything in and of itself seems important, but they’re all things that don’t directly serve classroom preparation. You become so overburdened that you end up not doing anything well.

Another thing is the team-teaching element. I actually think it’s meant that I don’t have as much freedom to respond to students’ interests and what they need. The whole mantra seems to be, let’s see how we can make this as easy as we can for ourselves: follow the rule book and get through the exercises. As a beginning teacher, I’m not going to criticise their team programming. But to teach rigorous thinking, do critical reading, you have to be a teacher who will prioritise unfolding student needs over the pre-planned needs of the organisation. They might mean sometimes not working in a team to simply economise on work.

I’ve found in my school that there’s a focus on a productivist approach to learning in other areas too. For one, the emphasis is mostly on getting students to produce work rather than get them to understand and make meaning. A lot of the scaffolding that teachers provide is about facilitating work in this way: here’s the formula for doing this type of task. It’s a mechanistic conception of teaching and learning. Today, we are working on this cog, which will make that other cog turn. And it ends up fetishising the material stuff that you want them to produce. We become forces in a machine that moves cogs around and makes a product. It doesn’t matter if it’s meaningful or understood. It’s easy to get caught up in this when everyone else is doing it and also when the tempo is high. So, it becomes difficult as a beginning teacher to trial a new way of providing feedback because good feedback focuses on understanding.

Sometimes, though, it’s easy to forget there are some fundamental ingredients to good teaching. Some are so obvious I can easily overlook them. One is that, at my school, I’m always encouraged to think of the groups of students under my supervision as my class. At the start of the term, I was worried that I would do the wrong thing and wouldn’t have any freedom. There might be someone watching over my shoulder. But there is a degree of autonomy. And in some subjects, I’m encouraged to connect with the world outside of the school, which gives me confidence to try things out myself. This has helped me situate the school in the world in some lessons. It has reassured me that I can change the program to cultivate curiosity. And one of the things I really love about the students at our school is that they’re often quite precocious and socially competent; they’re highly verbal and speak their minds and push back. I enjoy the students who make me explain why we need to do something. I find this motivating because it tests me out. Every day I have to ask myself, why am I teaching this? Why do I think this topic is important? This is critical thinking, and I want to reward this type of brashness in my students.

Claire’s Story: Growth Mindset

My school is in regional Victoria. It’s a really large school with over 1000 students and is hard-to-staff. My wish for my students is for them to connect deeply with their lived experience; having relationships with their community, feeling that sense of belonging, and being able to add value and give back. I first and foremost want all my students to feel safe in the classroom. If I have a good relationship with my students, then I can show them what being a responsible, consistent adult in their life is like. I want to be a stable role model who shows up without judgement. I think that’s important for them to see.

I found in Term 1 that my students were giving up easily. They had this very strong negative self-talk. Most were showing fixed mindset traits; stuck in this very closed, narrow-minded way of feeling about themselves and the work they produce. So, I decided to research growth mindset and introduce my students to mindsets. It made me rethink how I’m teaching them in the classroom; my pedagogy. It made me reflect on how I ask questions; how I give feedback; how I interact with them. I am probably fixed in a lot of the ways I am doing things because I’m a brand-new teacher; I’m not flexible yet. I don’t have the reference points. If something happens, I don’t know how to manage it for the first time. I’m just sort of putting on a bandaid while trying to solve it in the moment. I’m limited; I’m fixed by my vocabulary, my experience. In the moment, I’m thinking: What’s the right thing to do? In this interaction, I’m thinking: What can I do to help you? As I get better at reflecting on my practice, can I turn to the class and make it about everyone? Can I give a response that is virtuous and helps everyone? What if I could say the right thing? I know as I get better at teaching, I’m going to have so many better examples. It’s become also about my own mindset and how that manifests. I think I have to reflect after each class and ask: How can I adopt more of a growth mindset myself?

The habits of the bell ringing, the structure of the school day, looking at the board means that some students have given up before they’ve even walked into my classroom. Even if it’s going to be a really interesting class, nothing turns on for them because they’re already in this mindset where they think it’s going to be boring. They think, I’m not going to enjoy it, and as soon as the bell goes, I can get out and actually be free and enjoy myself. They have these preconceived ideas; this baggage. They get it from years of going through school and getting that same timetable, the same setting of the classroom. They’ve had it day in and day out for so many years, and they associate it with it being boring. And it’s very hard to change that. If I have them in period three or four, they’re on the edge of their seats. The periods are 75 min, so are very long. They can’t concentrate for very long. I often have to chunk things, have multiple activities, have a faster flow to avoid disaster classes.

I try to ask lots of open-ended questions and when I respond to their answers, I try to be open, not judging of what they say. My tone and inflection and delivery can’t be demanding. It has to be conversational; always conversational and curious. I’m genuinely interested in what you think. When a student responds with: I don’t know, I’ve learnt to wait for five seconds. I just pause and then I wait, and they think, she’s not going to talk. So, I’m giving them time to process it. I also never say their answer is wrong. I’ll say that’s a different perspective and try and open the floor. What’s another way of looking at it? I try to get them to keep thinking about it and ask: What else? Keep trying. I don’t say: That’s not it or that’s wrong. They’re so affected by their social standing and what their peers think of them, so that’s why shaming never works. The fact that some of these students just come into my classroom is a win. I try to model to them what living well looks like; being in the same good mood, smiling at them, trying to include them, praising them when they contribute and do work. That might be the biggest thing I can offer on that day.

Ben’s Story: Low Literacy Levels

I teach English and Humanities in a harder-to-staff college in regional Victoria. There’s a lot going on in my school around trauma and wellbeing. In our community, there’s higher rates of divorce, lower rates of secondary education, and higher rates of poverty when compared to the Australian average. So, I spend a lot of energy trying to build aspiration in my students. They have such low cultural capital. I’m really trying to get them to see different kinds of role models to understand different pathways in life and build aspiration; striving for a meaningful and purposeful life that is fulfilling and enjoyable and one they’re glad they’re living.

My school has invested a huge amount of time, energy, and class time into English because literacy levels are so low here. While English has more time dedicated to it than any other subject area, there still doesn’t seem to be any actual literacy focus to it; just more year level English content that doesn’t help to bridge that gap. At first, I thought there must be some plan here, and I just don’t understand it yet because I’m new. It felt like I was going a bit crazy because I could see the problem, yet the plan we were given was not addressing it. It was really frustrating. Nobody’s going to fix this if I don’t.

So, I’ve gone a bit rogue and started implementing a whole lot of literacy focused teaching in my English classes. I went off and studied a bit so I knew how to do it. Now I do a word of the week in the first lesson of every week; synonyms, antonyms, write sentences, do a morphology with that word so they get better with prefixes and suffixes. I also do the different sounds in the word and different kinds of endings. I’ve even requested another whiteboard, so it stays there all week as a visual reminder.

After seeing some great results, I shared this with the Head of English and the Head of Literacy. I suggested we try this approach with other English classes. They said: No. Some teachers will see this as you telling them what to do. They didn’t want to rock the boat. They work to a model that’s about position and rank. And there’s no collaborative working groups or project-based activities where a teacher can take charge of doing something regardless of where they are on the hierarchy. It goes down the line from the principal; and graduates just go and get the coffees. I think they are driven by an institutionalised way of doing things.

I think ego and pride in middle management prevents them from looking at other opportunities to improve and succeed. They don’t want to see the existing program as a failure because they created it. There’s no room for innovation or creativity. The middle leaders making these types of decisions are still traditional-type teachers who value a level of passivity from other teachers, treating them in the same kind of way as they do their students. It’s a very authoritarian model for leading. They don’t have the management skills I’ve seen from working in other professions. A middle leader’s job is very different from a classroom teacher’s. Once you’re managing people, you’re actually working for them. Your success is measured by how well your team does, not you. Your job is to remove obstacles for them, not reinforce them. That’s why stuff is so stagnant. It’s not a lack of momentum; it’s actually a huge amount of inertia. I feel like I’m having to deliberately hold myself back. You don’t want to get yourself isolated; schools can be political places; there’s a lot of power in the hands of a few.

I have a good peer network though that is not based in the school. All my good ideas come from having conversations with other like-minded peers. And my classroom is still my classroom. So, as long as I abide by the formative and summative assessment schedule, the rest is up to my own due diligence and professional approach. Because I know I am doing good things for my students and I am carefully assessing whether they’re working or not, I don’t think I am putting them at risk by deviating from the status quo. I’m not inventing stuff; I’m taking best practice and using it in my classroom.

Tim’s Story: One-on-One Discussions

I’m teaching in a rural school of about 350 students, so a lot of my kids will end up back on the farm. At the moment, I teach Year 10, 11, and 12 Science, Physics, and Maths. I want my students to feel comfortable being whoever they are. Particularly in Science, I want them to be able to think about the information they’re taking in and ask questions about its relevance. Not everyone is going to use every bit of the advanced Year 12 Maths that I teach, but some of them might use a little bit, and it’s good that they know they’ve got those tools if they need them. If they don’t want to go to uni and want to get an apprenticeship, I encourage them to keep going, keep the commitment, and finish what they set out to start. They might not get the best marks, but they can come along and enjoy and try and give it a go. And that’s what I ask of them.

There’s a fair bit of conflict that goes on in my practice. Three quarters of my teaching load is VCE,Footnote 4 where the VCE study score at the end of Year 12 is the be-all and end-all. There’s a heavy focus on content and that becomes the primary focus of my teaching; what you’ve got to teach, what the rules are for the SACs,Footnote 5 how many lab hours I’ve got available. It’s the volume of the content. And after a couple of years of COVID, kids are coming in and their fundamentals are not strong, so you can’t rush bits you might have previously been able to. This makes it harder to provide opportunities for them to be able to explore and think for themselves; when they just need to know the thing that’s on the exam. And we can’t stop for anything.

There’s a few students in my Year 11 Physics class who are really behind already. We’re less than a term into the year, and we’re already behind. So, I’m giving them a lot more independent practice time, for everyone. It allows me the time to get around and give those who really need it more individual support. I can have those one-on-one discussions and find out what their motivation is for being in the class; what’s their reason for being here. I tap into the drive that pulls them through so I can help them when things get hard. I have to keep them interested and help them to see the relevance of what they’re learning; getting enough impetus so they can get through the times when they can’t see it as clearly. I build that relationship.

Resourcing issues are a problem for us. Fortunately, over COVID, we were able to benefit from the virtual labs for free. I’ve been able to get access to a radiation prac for my Year 11 Physics class that we’d never get to run. You can’t do radiation pracs in schools.

This is great because we can just book them and be done, and not worry about the funding. But other equipment like electronics kits are broken and look like they pre-date me. Last week, I spent one of my free periods pulling apart and repairing a bit of equipment rather than sending it somewhere to be fixed because of the expense. And the cost of waste disposal for a chem prac; they charge such a lot of money just to pick up a small container because it’s out of their way. And it’s the only option we have. The school’s budget has to pay for that, so we have to be careful in terms of the waste we produce, which limits what pracs we can do.

But my school has really supportive, positive staff. They’re willing to share their expertise. Because we’re a smaller school, everyone’s in the one staffroom, which really helps. There’s a feeling that we’re all in this together. And because we’re a small school, the largest class I’ve got at the moment is 15 students. When you’ve got a class of 10–15, you can spend an extra five minutes with every student in a way that you just couldn’t if you had a bigger class. I can really take the time to extend them and get them thinking beyond what they’re expecting of themselves.

Teaching Well and the Practice Architectures of Schooling

In the four case stories of teaching well above, we now investigate how pedagogical praxis is situated in the everyday practices of the Nexus teachers as they make decisions in the moment about what to say, what to do, and how to relate to their students and others. In this chapter, practice is defined as:

a form of human action in history, in which particular activities (doings) are comprehensible in terms of particular ideas and talk (sayings), and when the people involved are distributed in particular kinds of relationships (relatings), and when this combination of sayings, doings and relatings ‘hangs together’ in the project of the practice (the ends and purposes that motivate the practice). (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 31)

Practice, Kemmis et al. assert, is constituted in the sayings, doings, and relatings which shape, and are shaped by, what they describe as practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014). Practice architectures enable and constrain practices and hang together in three dimensions peculiar to different sites: cultural-discursive (language shaping people’s ‘sayings’ and thinking), material-economic (work shaping people’s ‘doings’), and social–political (power shaping people’s ‘relatings’ to one another) (Kemmis et al., 2014). Like Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer (2015), we argue that the theory of practice architectures provides a mechanism for developing a more holistic view about how beginning teachers navigate praxis-oriented pedagogical practice; a view that accounts for local sites and circumstances. In the discussion that follows, we investigate how the practice architectures, the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social–political arrangements within particular sites of schooling, enable and constrain these practices for beginning teachers. We explore how the everyday practices of Nexus teachers get caught up in existing discourses and ways of thinking about things (Kemmis, 2022) in existing patterns of what it means to teach well within the established hierarchies and patterns of relationships in their schools.

Teaching Well in Semantic Space: Cultural-Discursive Arrangements

The cultural-discursive arrangements in schools prefigure all teaching practices including what is said by Nexus teachers in and about their practices (sayings). The language they use, the issues they discuss, and the big ideas they think about are distinctive to the educative spaces of their school. Some cultural-discursive arrangements are organised to constrain Nexus teachers’ ability to connect with their colleagues. One example is when Ben discusses his lack of voice as a beginning teacher. He describes how suggestions he made to other teachers about improving literacy in English lessons were rejected based on his lack of experience in the classroom. Shaped by the hierarchical circumstances of the workplace, where the opinions of more experienced colleagues are valued over those of graduates, opportunities for him to lead and contribute to changing teaching practices have been scarce.

As a beginning teacher, the limitations of her own talk when providing instruction in the classroom impacts how Claire responds to her students. Her lack of confidence affects her ability to “say the right thing”. She acknowledges that she is still building a repertoire of vocabulary to use when answering students’ spontaneous questions during lessons. Another arrangement that constrains ‘teaching well’ for both Claire and Michael occurs in the toing-and-froing of classroom talk. Claire’s students display “very strong negative self-talk…stuck in this very closed, narrow-minded way of feeling about themselves and the work they produce”. When asked a question, her students regularly respond, “I don’t know”. Michael’s students quite often say, “I don’t even want to look at this work. Or, I hate it. Or, what’s the point of this, I’m never going to use this in my life”. In response to such student talk that diminishes the value of their work, both Claire and Michael are working to transform existing cultural-discursive arrangements in their classrooms by trialling new ways “of providing feedback; asking lots of open-ended questions”; giving wait time to process answers; and by responding to their students “with genuine interest” and without judgement.

There is also evidence of Nexus teachers demonstrating agency in their site of practice to make changes to long-standing semantic conditions (Kaukko et al., 2020). Ben looks for “conversations with other like-minded peers” outside his school environment to get good ideas. Tim uses one-on-one discussions with his students to “find out what their motivation is for being in the class”. He generates the time needed for this new practice by giving everyone more independent practice time to free up “the time to get around and give those who really need it more individual support”. The intentional changes that Nexus teachers make to their everyday work are guided by their commitment to ‘doing the right thing’.

Teaching Well in Physical Space: Material-Economic Arrangements

The material-economic arrangements within schools impact the work of all four Nexus teachers. Their stories show how the physical conditions of the classroom, school, and the wider system prefigure what is done in their practice (doings). They each talk about the structural arrangements in schools and how these constrain their teaching. Michael describes “the incredible administrative bloat that overcomes teaching” and explains that the constant stream of bureaucratic and compliance tasks steal time away from quality teaching and learning. Such tasks include exam preparation and marking, writing detailed student behavioural notes, data tracking, and his involvement in extracurricular activities. Habits of the school day such as bells ringing, the physical layout of the classroom, and timetabling also restrict students’ engagement in Claire’s lessons. She reports that, after years of routines within the institutions of schooling, many of her students have given up on the drudgery they associate with them and carry negative emotions about their school day into her classroom. Tim identifies the VCE curriculum and the volume of content he must get through as a conflict. It “makes it harder to provide opportunities for them to be able to explore and think for themselves; when they just need to know the thing that’s on the exam. And we can’t stop for anything”.

While the practice architectures in a site foreshadow particular practices and actions, they do not predetermine them (Kaukko et al., 2020). As an example, Tim finds a lack of resourcing in his small rural school an ongoing problem when teaching science practical sessions, but he’s also recognised it as an opportunity to think outside the box and use virtual laboratories as a replacement for inaccessible hands-on equipment. Another consequence of rurality for Tim is smaller class sizes. This allows him to find extra one-on-one time with every student so they can receive individualised instruction and support from him.

Furthermore, Michael acknowledges the “degree of autonomy” he has within the curriculum to “change the program to cultivate curiosity”. And Ben celebrates the fact that “my classroom is still my classroom”. In the pre-constructed work of a being a teacher, Tim, Michael, and Ben have shown how to use the objects and set-ups of the material-economic arrangements of their classrooms to mediate their lived practices, understand their agency as professionals and create changes for themselves and their students.

Teaching Well in Social Space: Social–Political Arrangements

The social–political arrangements of a site prefigure how people relate to one another. This social space is realised in relation to issues of power and solidarity. Schools are often seen as hierarchical organisations; marked by the exercise of role-related power (Kaukko et al., 2020). In some schools where Nexus teachers work, there is contestation between Nexus teachers and school middle management around how to interpret teaching well. Michael acknowledges the tension he experiences with his school’s productivist approach to student outcomes, which sits in opposition to his own beliefs around learning as meaning making. Ben also recognises the political nature of schooling and how the decisions that are made by the school’s executive hold the rest of the staff on a particular course. They’ve both found that working as a team sometimes means economising on output rather than working together to achieve real outcomes for students. As beginning teachers, they feel like they don’t have the self-confidence to hold the ‘old timers’ to account and are often left feeling disempowered by the traditions that reproduce the social practices in their schools.

How students relate with each other can both constrain and enable the teaching practices of Nexus teachers. Claire describes how her students are “so affected by their social standing and what their peers think of them”, they are worried to speak up in class. She is working to re-shape the social space of her classroom by role modelling “what living well looks like for her students; being in the same good mood, smiling at them, trying to include them”. She tries to be open and non-judgmental. In the moment, she finds herself thinking: “What’s the right thing to do? What can I do to help you?” Likewise, Tim looks for ways to “encourage” his students “to keep going, keep the commitment, and finish what they set out to start”. On the other hand, Michaels’ students are “quite precocious and socially competent; they’re highly verbal and speak their minds”. He finds these interactions “motivating because it tests me out. Every day I have to ask myself: Why I am teaching this? Why do I think this topic is important?” These deliberate determinations about what to do now or next (Kemmis et al., 2014) under the circumstances at that time (Edwards-Groves et al., 2018) are examples of where dispositions of prudence, ethics, and morality enter the day-to-day interactions between Nexus teachers and their students. Acting with this realisation is the work of praxis-oriented educators.

Conclusion

This chapter provides empirical illustrations of how four beginning teachers’ ideas about living well unfold in their everyday practices as teaching well. Such pedagogical practices have been explored as sayings, doings, and relatings, guided and glued together by the representation of “the best possible way to act in their current situation amidst the arrangements and circumstances that they encounter” (Kaukko et al., 2020, p. 6). Through a praxis lens, we have shown how the practices of four beginning teachers not only respond to their own moral compass, but also to the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social–political arrangements in schools and classrooms. It is not just that practices hold everyday ways of living and working in their course; it is also those established discourses and ways of thinking that justify how we do things now, established material arrangements (the layout of a classroom, for example), and established patterns of relationships (for example, between teachers and the principal, between teachers, and between teachers and students). The studying of these teachers’ practices in response to the arrangements can help us to understand what new teachers desire for their students (the world worth living in) and what they find possible (the world in which they find themselves). Guided by these discussions, we can support new teachers, reminding them to stay true to their beliefs and to stay committed in their daily practice to co-create with their students a world worth living in.