For four years, now, I’ve been working with two groups of early career teachers: the students doing their Grad Dip and ex-Grad Dip students as they start their careers in schools.

With the first group – the Grad Dip students – the most interesting work has been exploring the tricky intersection between competing pressures: gathering workable strategies for managing classroom and systemic challenges on the one hand, and deepening a commitment to social justice ideals on the other. We explore the following provocations:

• What kind of a teacher do I want to be?
• Will I be allowed to be the teacher I want to be?
• To whom am I accountable?
• Am I ready to teach?

This work has led to two publications so far:

1. Shann, Edwards, Pittard, & Germantse, 2013;
2. Shann, Germantse, Pittard, & Cunneen, 2013.

It seems to me that there is a potential virtual community here, one that is interested in working together, in a number of different ways, on those central provocations.

Here are some ideas for continuing this work in an Early Career Teacher Collective (ECTC)

• We have two articles soon to be published and more in the pipeline. These are articles produced by our community, speaking about issues of urgent concern or deep interest to its members. One of the activities of our Collective would be to disseminate and discuss these articles.
  
  
• There’s a great deal more that might be said about the experience of early career teachers attempting to become the teacher they want to be, while at the same time finding ways of working within systems. What are early career teachers discovering? Where are there opportunities and potentials? What new possibilities open up when we pool our experiences and insights?
  
  
• The premise of our first paper (Shann et al., 2013?) is that a deep conversation about things that matter relieves stress, creates resilience, creates courage and reveals possibilities for action. Our Collective would be a place for intelligent, grounded and supported conversations, out of which theoretically informed writing would emerge. These are the types of conversations that have taken place at times in the Grad Dip, for example, and which can be difficult to recreate in the rush and pressure of the life of the early career teacher.
  
  
• The ECTC could be used as a pathway into higher degree research: a Masters or a PhD.
  
  
• I’m periodically attending national and international conferences and reading educational journal articles. Our Collective would be a place where I would share some of this.