Not the job I imagined: teachers’ expectations of their work in the context of teaching shortages

In the context of extreme teaching shortages in Australia, this paper examines the concept of a ‘teaching imaginary’. It explores the discrepancy between teachers’ expectations of their work, primarily focused on classroom teaching, professional judgement and relationships with students, and the realities of their often administrative and managerial roles. In this paper we draw on narratives from teachers collected as part of a larger ethnographic study into teacher retention, and present excerpts from our conversations with teachers to illustrate how some are struggling to reconcile their daily work with how they had once imagined the work of teaching, leading to a sense of frustration and dislocation. In the context of mounting neoliberal accountabilities and managerialism, we demonstrate how teachers reconcile, navigate or struggle with their work, based, in part, on their socialised expectations of the job. While younger teachers’ conceptions of teaching are often more aligned with current expectations of their jobs, some of the more experienced, and older, teachers feel a greater discrepancy between what they had wanted to do and what they find themselves doing, leading to potential ‘walking points’ where teachers find themselves increasingly dissatisfied with a job that is so unlike what they had once imagined.