This article explores how TCTELA's 2024 Teachers of the Year forged the future through their literacy teaching at the elementary, middle school, high school, and college levels. Each essay captures how they understand their work as literacy educators and intentionally educate their students toward a brighter future amid trying local contexts. The…

The focus of the achievement gap seems to be less about racial and ethnic distinctions and more about disparities in socioeconomic status. Students from affluent and secure backgrounds have a running head start on students mired in poverty. Few young people in the United States live in more challenging conditions than the children of the eastern…

Poverty has always been a problem in the United States and no doubt the condition unfortunately will always prevail. Title One schools will always have children enrolled who come from the lower socioeconomic class. This article has to do with the devastating effect of poverty, including stories from a classroom teacher of students who lived in…

This paper presents an argument for the development of an Irish Chartered Teacher initiative which would acknowledge and accredit the professionalism of experienced and accomplished teachers. It begins by examining the current position of teaching as a profession based on findings from Irish and international research studies. Issues surrounding…

This essay invites reflection on the phenomena of time as it impacts the day-to-day life of teachers. It also explores assumptions about time and teaching in three areas: first, beliefs about the force of time and the teacher's struggle to control it; second, beliefs about the potential of time and the benefits of its passing for teachers and…

It is widely recognized today that a teacher's surrounding professional community inevitably affects the kind of teaching that students are offered. However, until recently, it has been difficult to quantify and systematically study the nature of professional relationships in schools and districts. The articles in this special issue provide a…

This article uses the concept of emotional labour to understand some of the changes that are ongoing in the teaching profession. While research has explored the impact of the new performance culture upon teachers' work and identified a marginalisation of the caring and emotional aspects of teaching, the concept of emotional labour allows us to…

This document is an account of the authors' experience as principal for a day at an elementary school in his hometown. This experience cause the writer to reflect on what it meant to be a teacher.

Notwithstanding over 20 years of propaganda promoting board school teaching as an ideal career for upper-class women, it appears that in the 1890s it was still unusual for "girls of good family" to go in for it. Therefore, it was an eccentric plunge in 1898 when Eglantyne Jebb, an Oxford student from a prosperous land-owning family,…

This article debates three tensions within the contemporary teaching profession in Great Britain, in terms of education policy after the 1988 Education Reform Act. The first is between prospective and retrospective identities, as defined by Bernstein (1996/2000). The second is between teachers' expectations of professional status, and centralised…