Perceiving Professional Risk in Five Stories

Abstract

Using a split page structure as a physical delineation between story and analysis, the author examines teachers’ stories of perceived professional risks involved in teaching social studies as a first-year teacher. Collectively, these stories from young teachers tell a larger story, full of concrete, visceral, and textural details of the challenges of induction and the adaptation to varied school contexts. The author finds that young teachers have contextually based and emotionally charged stories of perceived and actual professional risk in the early years of teaching. This knowledge is lived, understood, and re-storied through the stories they share in safe, trusted, and reciprocated knowledge communities, and offers tremendous insight into school contexts, the static nature of instruction and pedagogy, and teacher attrition. Their stories can teach multiple audiences what it means to enter the pressure cooker environments of today’s schools as a young teacher.