Stories of struggle and resilience: Examining the experiences of two Spanish teachers through history in person
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the career trajectories of two teachers in the United States and their decision to leave teaching Spanish. Data for the study emerged from the teachers’ narratives about their school-based experiences and the consequences of those experiences on their decisions to reorient their work in the educational community. We adopted the theoretical framework of history in person to analyze the interactions between the teachers’ own personal histories with the histories of the institutions in which they taught. Data collection began during the two teachers’ student-teaching semester and continued for 5 years after their initial induction into the language teaching profession and included interviews and email communications. The context was North Carolina, a state experiencing a severe teacher shortage and conflicts regarding teacher compensation. Findings highlight the challenges these teachers faced and how their interactions with historically institutionalized struggles were consequential to their professional futures. Implications for research, policy, and teacher preparation are discussed.
In the current climate of teacher shortages and increasing rates of teacher burnout, research into what influences teachers’ decisions to stay or leave the profession is critical. Research suggests that approximately half of early-career teachers leave their position within the first 5 years of teaching (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Sass et al., 2012; Sims & Jerrim, 2020; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011, 2016). Some leave the profession altogether (i.e., attrition) whereas others leave their classrooms or schools for other positions. In this article, we use the term “turnover” to encompass both scenarios. Turnover disrupts school stability and has the potential to negatively impact student learning (Kini & Podolsky, 2016). It increases schools’ percentages of inexperienced and unlicensed teachers, begets further turnover, and decreases student achievement (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Ladd & Sorensen, 2016; Ronfeldt et al., 2013; Sorensen & Ladd, 2020). Schools with the highest percentage of students of color and students living in poverty are typically the most adversely impacted by teacher turnover. A 2016 study found that these schools had four times the number of uncertified teachers as those enrolling the fewest numbers of students of color (Sutcher et al., 2016).
North Carolina, where the present study took place, ranks in the top 10 states with the highest percentage of teacher turnover (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). From September of 2016 to 2022, teacher attrition in North Carolina averaged 11.9%, with the largest percentage of teachers, 15.6%, leaving in the 2021 to 2022 school year. Each percentage point represents approximately 1,000 teachers, meaning that over 15,000 teachers left their positions from 2021 to 2022. In September of 2022, there was a 1.8% gap between the number of teachers that left the profession (14,700) and those that entered (13,000), the largest such gap over the last 6 years, illustrating that schools are increasingly struggling to fill vacant positions (Bastian & Fuller, 2023).1 To fill these gaps, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction offers alternative preparation pathways so that schools can hire unlicensed individuals, with stipulations that they must simultaneously enroll in a licensure program (termed a “lateral entry” license when the present study took place).
This study examined the unique experiences of two Spanish teachers who entered the profession through this lateral entry pathway, shedding light on the factors that ultimately led to their decisions to quit teaching Spanish. Data collection began during their student-teaching semesters when the lead author was their university supervisor. Both were unlicensed full-time teachers of record completing their student-teaching semesters in their own Spanish classrooms. Although the study was initially designed to examine how their own experiences as language learners influenced their teaching practices, the profound and consequential role of the institutions in which they taught quickly became clear. Unlike much of the existing research, the present study followed the same two teachers for 5 years. In this way, findings provide personal narratives to complement the quantitative studies of “big data” that have examined why teachers leave the profession. Although these quantitative studies have provided static generalizations regarding the often contentious interaction of teachers and institutions, they tend to freeze persons in moments of time rather than to conceive their reality as movement and change (Cope & Kalantzis, 2020; Hiver, 2017). It is in uncovering the act of transforming the self where the interaction of institution and individual, their histories in person, become more than remnants of the past. We maintain that these storied experiences of teachers provide context and greater insight into the struggles of individuals and institutions than static taxonomies can offer. From this perspective, these contextualized meanings of struggle are conceived of in cinematographic terms as “a matter of where, when, and how it is [in] the surrounding universe of meanings” (Cope and Kalantzis, 2020, p. 47) rather than snapshots at one moment in time.
To paint a broader picture of teacher turnover, we begin by reviewing existing quantitative research at large, primarily focusing on studies situated in North America, where the present study took place. For a more nuanced perspective, we next narrow our focus to world language teachers specifically, including both quantitative and qualitative investigations, and expanding beyond the United States. We subsequently explain the conceptual framework of history in person (Holland & Lave, 2001, 2009), which served as our analytical framework through which to understand the situated professional trajectories of our two participants. We used narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), focusing on the stories told by these two teachers to make sense of their experiences. By using the history-in-person framework within a narrative inquiry approach, we illustrate how individuals’ personal narratives contribute to broader historical understandings and interpretations.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Factors influencing teacher attrition and turnover
Various quantitative studies have tracked factors that influence high teacher turnover. They are often categorized into three strands (i.e., personal, school, and external factors). Research focused on personal factors suggests that level of education, marital status, and sex are not predictors of turnover (Gillet et al., 2022), but age, achievement scores, and race are (Nguyen et al., 2020). In their metanalysis of 120 studies, most of which were conducted in the United States, Nguyen et al. (2020) found that younger teachers were marginally more likely to turnover than older teachers, teachers with higher scores on college entrance exams were more likely to turn over than those with lower scores, and White teachers were slightly more likely to turnover than non-White and Hispanic teachers. Despite this last finding, there still remains a diminishing number of minoritized teachers in US schools, particularly Black females (Fenwick, 2022; Hill-Jackson, 2017).
The second strand of existing research focuses on school factors that influence turnover. Based on the National Center for Education Statistics Schools and Staffing Survey, 2011−2012 and Teacher Follow-Up Survey, 2012−2013, Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond (2017) found that 21% of teachers reported leaving the profession due to unhappiness with school administration, and another 21% reported leaving due to dissatisfaction with the career of teaching. Of the 21% who fell into the latter category, approximately one third reported that issues with school administration accounted for their dissatisfaction. This finding was later corroborated by Nguyen et al.’s (2020) metanalysis, which found that strong administrative support led to lower rates of teacher turnover, as did strong in-service professional development opportunities.
A subset of the literature on school factors focuses more specifically on burnout—a psychological state of resource depletion and exhaustion that can lead to teacher turnover (Gillet et al., 2022; Taylor et al., 2019). Gillet et al. (2022) analyzed survey responses from 951 French–Canadian public school teachers and found that those with fewer student discipline problems and better facilities were less likely to burn out. Charter school teachers were more likely to turn over than public school teachers (Nguyen et al., 2020). Student inattention was connected to teachers’ feelings of self-efficacy, which also predicted burnout profiles. Teachers who were more confident in their teaching abilities were less likely to experience high rates of burnout (Gillet et al., 2022). Finally, another school-based factor influencing burnout is a lack of social support, which Taylor et al. (2019) identified as a primary source of stress that can lead to burnout.
The third strand of teacher turnover research focuses on external and policy factors (e.g., testing and accountability measures). The factor most relevant to the present study within this strand was teacher pay. While most individuals enter the profession for reasons such as a love for teaching or desire to enact change (Kissau et al., 2019; Peng et al., 2024), low salaries in the United States cause many to leave. Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond (2017) found that 13% of their sample reported leaving for financial reasons, and approximately 27% of teachers who reported dissatisfaction with their jobs indicated that financial reasons were the root cause (27%). In the United States, teacher salaries have remained largely stagnant since 2000 (Walker, 2022). This stagnancy is exacerbated by the fact that US teachers teach about 200 more hours than their global peers annually (Sparks, 2022), and this number has likely increased with the pandemic and shortage of substitute teachers (Craig et al., 2023).
Studies focused on world language teachers
Researchers have found some factors related to turnover that are unique to world language teachers. These factors often relate to working conditions, available resources, and support. For example, unlike teachers of other content areas, language teachers, especially those who teach languages other than English, often have to create their own curriculum and materials (Ewart, 2009; López-Gómez & Albright, 2009; Mason, 2017; Swanson & Huff, 2010). They often teach various levels of the same language, have large classes, and have classes composed of students with widely differing proficiency levels (Ewart, 2009; Mason, 2010, 2017; Mason & Poyatos Matas, 2016; Swanson & Huff, 2010). This heavy workload can lead to feelings of low self-efficacy, stress, and burnout, all of which can lead to turnover (Acheson et al., 2016; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2017; Sulis et al., 2022).
The discrepancy between the working conditions for foreign language teachers and those of general education teachers and teachers of other disciplines has led some teachers to move from foreign language teaching into other areas of the curriculum. These teachers have overwhelmingly expressed higher levels of satisfaction in their new roles. (p. 57)
Taking a different approach, several recent qualitative investigations have instead examined the characteristics of world teachers who thrived. While these took place in contexts outside of the United States, they offer insight into the present study. Haukäs (2024) interviewed three recently retired German teachers in Norway and found that autonomy (i.e., choosing their own content and approach to teaching) and strong relationships with students, colleagues, and administrators contributed to their long careers as teachers. Similarly, investigating teacher commitment, Peng et al. (2024) interviewed 10 teachers of Chinese in Myanmar. They found that the teachers who felt satisfied in their careers expressed trust in their colleagues and administrators and felt that Chinese language education was supported by the government and society at large.
As this review illustrates, existing literature provides deep insight into personal, school, external (e.g., policy), and even content-specific factors that influence teacher turnover and retention. Most were informed by a single snapshot in time and some presented contributing factors to teacher career abandonment as separate issues rather than examining the dialectical interaction of multiple factors. Craig et al. (2023) contend that “a single factor rarely causes teachers to abandon their careers” (p. 21). Personal characteristics, for example, interact with school-based factors, which are intricately connected and influenced by external and policy factors. The interactions of all these factors play a role in teacher turnover. Thus, we turn to history in person (Holland & Lave, 2009) as a way to examine the interaction of factors and explain how this interaction directly and differently affected the career trajectories of two language teachers.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
History in person
In this article, we use history in person as a theoretical framework to make sense of two teachers’ decisions to leave the Spanish classroom. This framework illustrates how history is brought to the present through the minds and bodies of individuals as they interact with other individuals, forces, and institutions that have their own histories and struggles (Holland & Lave, 2009). Individuals have their own histories, which are socially derived practices from past experiences in historical settings that they have internalized, such as schooling, formative social interactions, or personal beliefs. Similarly, every institution has historical struggles, that is, enduring struggles with which the institution has grappled over time that have an impact on the individuals within that institution. For example, educational institutions may endure struggles for funding, teacher shortages, or required test scores. These two histories interact—individuals operating within an institution cannot escape the institution's past struggles and an institution cannot escape individuals’ own personal histories and the expectations that constitute it.
The collision of these opposing struggles often breeds contentious practice in which an individual struggles with issues of identity and agency (Holland & Lave, 2001; see Figure 1). Individuals are not victims of their past but engage in a continual process of self-making, or what may be called agency, the capacity to respond critically to problematic situations (Biesta & Tedder, 2007). From a history-in-person perspective, past experiences are laminated onto current experiences, creating layers of identity positions and thickening over time (Holland & Leander, 2004). The two types of history “are inseparable” and “locked in a constant power struggle, and local contentious practice is the locus for observing the interface” (Lee, 2021, p. 696). In their application of the model, Holland and Lave (2001) illustrated how contentious practice arises from the struggle of two opposing forces in contexts such as Black class formation (Gregory, 2001), the strip-searching of women in Northern Ireland (Aretxaga, 2001), and a social history of antiracism organization in Guatemala (Warren, 2001).
Individuals move along ontogenetic trajectories of identity [and agency], constrained by larger patterns but also potentially identifiable in various ways at any point. Social groups, institutions, and traditions—including those that carry categories of identity available to individuals—also move along extended, more slowly developing trajectories. (p. 165)
Always intertwined and interacting, these factors, taken together, influence the local practices of individuals and institutions and often result in contentiousness (Davin et al., 2018; Donato & Davin, 2018). In summary, as this narrative inquiry will show, “material and symbolic resources are distributed disproportionally across socially identified groups and generate different social relations and perspectives among participants in such groups” (Holland & Lave, 2001, p. 5).
METHOD
- RQ. What individual factors contributed to two teachers’ decisions to quit teaching Spanish?
When data collection first began, we did not know that the teachers would eventually leave their positions. The original intent of the study was to use the history-in-person framework to understand their classroom discourse, that is, how their past experiences as learners shaped their discursive practices. The title of the initial Institutional Review Board application was “Influences on novice teachers’ practices” and, like many qualitative investigations, cast a broad net in terms of data sources (e.g., video recordings of classroom teaching, interview recordings, course assignments, and emails) and analyses. However, as time passed and we continued to maintain contact with these two individuals, different stories emerged, and we amended the RQ. The findings presented in this article focus on the teachers' stories related to why they decided to leave the Spanish classroom.
This study used narrative inquiry as the methodology to understand the teachers’ decisions to leave. Narrative inquiry focuses on how individuals experience the world through the stories that they tell (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) and is often used for understanding teachers’ identity and agency (e.g., Altan & Lane, 2018; Chaaban et al., 2021). Narrative inquiry recognizes that reality is socially constructed (Creswell et al., 2003) and is not concerned with an objective truth like positivist research (Byrne-Armstrong, 2001). In narrative inquiry, narrative texts are the result of interaction between the researcher and the participants (Clandinin & Huber, 2012). The researcher elicits stories from participants that often include “a temporal ordering of events and effort to make something out of those events” (Sandelowski, 1991, p. 162). The researcher uses those stories to construct narratives, which are then shared with participants, as we did, for clarification and further insight (Altan & Lane, 2018).
Context
North Carolina is a context with its own unique institutionalized struggles. Since the salary freezes that took place from 2009 to 2014, North Carolina typically ranks in the bottom 20% for teacher pay in the nation. For example, during the 2020−2021 school year, North Carolina ranked second to last in the southeast region with an average starting salary of $39,695 (Business for Educational Success and Transformation [BEST], 2023). In 2013, North Carolina eliminated its provision to award pay raises to teachers who completed a master's degree, resulting in a decrease in enrollment in master's programs across the state. In addition to eliminating master's pay, the state eliminated postretirement health care benefits, effective for those hired after January 2021. In 2018, the state eliminated tenure for teachers, replacing it with a system of multiyear contracts.
Amidst these changes, a shift occurred in entry pathways for teachers. To address high teacher turnover, North Carolina began to offer lateral entry and residency pathway programs in which unlicensed individuals who held a bachelor's degree were hired to teach full time—provided that they enrolled in a licensure program. Researchers found that teachers who entered the profession through these alternative entry points had the highest turnover rates and the lowest average level of student growth on standardized tests when compared to those who entered with a license (BEST, 2023). Despite this finding, the percentage of new teachers entering the profession without a license increased from 20% in 2015 to 37% in 2021 (BEST, 2023).
Researcher positionality
In the present study, the first author was the student-teaching supervisor of the two participants. She collected all data, which she shared with the second author. Author 1 was a product of North Carolina schools herself, attending kindergarten through 12th grade in the public school system and earning her teaching license and master's in world language education in the state. After moving away for 12 years for employment and a doctoral degree, she returned to North Carolina to direct the world language teacher preparation program at a public university. At the time of this investigation, she had worked in world language teacher preparation, teaching methodology and assessment courses, for approximately 14 years. The second author was the first author's doctoral advisor. He had worked in world language teacher preparation for approximately 34 years at a university in the Northeastern United States after teaching French in high school for 10 years. Together, the authors have collaborated for approximately 15 years on research related to world language teacher preparation.
Participants
Participants were selected partially for convenience. Shortly after her return to North Carolina, the first author acted as a student-teaching university supervisor for one semester. In this role, she entered the schools in which her three assigned supervisees taught to observe and offer feedback. Two of the three were entering the profession through the lateral entry pathway previously described and were working as full-time teachers of record while simultaneously completing the internship in their own classrooms. This article focuses on them, primarily because their stories offered insights into the challenges faced by teachers in North Carolina, and because they maintained contact with the first author after graduation.
The two participants, Dawn and Shana (pseudonyms), were both females whose first language was English and who had learned Spanish as a world language in the United States. Dawn was a 26-year-old White woman who was in her second year of teaching. She was part of Teach for America (TFA), an alternative teacher certification program that recruits recent high-achieving college graduates to teach in various content areas in high-needs schools. This program had provided her with some initial training and placed her in the school where she taught, but she was completing her coursework and student teaching through the university. Shana was a 32-year-old Black woman who had taught Spanish for 2 years previously as an adjunct at a local university but was in her first year teaching in the primary and secondary education (K−12) setting. Both participants were enrolled in a 21-credit postbaccalaureate in-person program designed for individuals seeking an initial professional educator's license in world language education. When this investigation began, both were enrolled in their final semester at the university: the student-teaching internship.
Data sources
Data sources included in-person interviews, virtual interviews, and email exchanges. The first author conducted three in-depth in-person interviews with each participant during Year 1 of the study during their student-teaching semester and one in-depth virtual interview during Year 5, at which time each participant had left teaching Spanish. Questions for each were informed by the history-in-person framework and included both retrospective questions focused on participants’ personal histories and here-and-now questions focused on their current practices and struggles. The Year 5 interview asked participants to reflect on the factors that had influenced their decisions to leave the Spanish classroom, probing their autobiographical memories of events or factors that were highly significant to their decisions (Herlihy et al., 2012). All interviews were recorded and transcribed with participants’ permission.
Emails were also used as a data source in the present study with participants’ permission. During each year of the study, the first author kept in contact with the two participants via informal email exchanges, and each year she reached out to inquire how the participants were doing. Responses to these emails ranged from two to three sentences in some years to long paragraphs with multiple back-and-forth exchanges in others. Sometimes, the teachers reached out for advice. To protect the identity of the participants, we do not include the dates of the interviews when reporting the findings. Instead, we use labels such as “Year 1, Interview 1,” “Year 3 email,” or “Year 5 interview.”
Member checking occurred twice during the research study. One year into the study, the researchers composed narrative texts about each participant in preparation for a research conference based on Year 1 data only. Both participants responded that the narratives were accurate. Five years later, following the completion of data collection, the researchers sent the participants the findings of the present article. Dawn responded with minor changes that have been incorporated in this analysis, and Shana responded that the narratives were accurate.
Data analysis
Data analysis was iterative. During Year 1, after each of the three interviews, Author 1 transcribed the recording and sent it to Author 2. We both read the transcripts through the lens of history in person and wrote and shared memos via email. We then met virtually to engage in a process of “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013, p. 261), staying focused on theoretical concepts while carefully reading through all data sources. We began with deductive codes that corresponded to the categories in Figure 1, including personal struggles, institutionalized struggles, and local contentious practices, by highlighting and discussing relevant portions of the texts. Beginning in this way allowed us to harmonize our data with the theoretical framework (Saldaña, 2013). The first author then uploaded the transcripts into NVivo (https://lumivero.com/products/nvivo/) and assigned second-level inductive codes, “allowing the collected data to speak for itself” (Saldaña, 2013, p. 54). For example, codes that we created under institutionalized struggles included low pay, marginalization of Spanish, and lack of leadership. Questions for each subsequent interview were developed based on the analysis of the previous interview. At the end of Year 1, we composed narratives for each participant and sent them to participants for member checking.
Data analysis resumed in Year 5, at which point both teachers had left the Spanish classroom. Author 1 uploaded all email exchanges with each participant into NVivo and read through each iteratively. She also reread the initial three interviews with each participant. She then developed a final set of interview questions for each participant that included questions like, “Thinking back to your time at [school name], what were the biggest struggles that you faced?” She uploaded these interview transcripts into NVivo and used the same process of first assigning deductive codes directly from the history-in-person framework, that is, personal struggles, institutionalized struggles, and local contentious practices (see Figure 1) before a second round of inductive coding (e.g., burnout, changed school, and changed content area). These were shared and discussed by both authors.
Once coding was complete, we began the process of narrative writing. We wrote narratives to describe the personal history of each participant, labeled as “personal histories” in the findings section. To understand how these personal histories interacted with institutionalized struggles, we met to discuss themes present in each participant's data set. For Dawn, we developed the theme of “unencumbered and overachieving in an underresourced school.” For Shana, we developed the theme of “high expectations for marginalized subject without administrator support.” We collaboratively wrote narrative texts for each theme drawing upon interview and email transcripts. We also wrote a narrative explaining each teacher's ultimate transformation (i.e., Dawn moving to administration, Shana changing content areas). Author 1 shared and workshopped these narratives with colleagues at the ACTFL/Middlebury Research Forum, discussing when to present the participants as individuals (e.g., personal histories) and when to share their narratives together (e.g., leaving the classroom). We then sent each narrative to participants for member checking and incorporated suggested feedback.
FINDINGS
We begin by presenting the professional life stories (i.e., personal histories) of Dawn and Shana and their experiences as Spanish teachers in their respective schools. We next share separate narratives for each, explaining how each teacher's personal history interacted with the institutionalized struggles of their context. Finally, we return to their collective experience, presenting the outcomes of their professional transformations together. By drawing on the categories presented in this model and associating them with these two individuals, what emerges is an understanding of the contentiousness that may occur when an individual's past and present interact with institutional culture, assumptions, and practices.
Personal histories
Dawn
During our first interview, Dawn described her own experiences learning Spanish and deciding to become a teacher. She had learned Spanish in New Jersey public schools, in a district well known for having strong language instruction. She began learning Spanish in elementary school and continued throughout high school. Dawn attended an elite university, majored in international relations with a focus on Latin America, and minored in Spanish. Graduating in the top of her class, she was recruited by TFA and placed in a high-needs, underresourced urban high school in North Carolina. During our initial interview, Dawn explained that because she taught in “a low-income environment,” she had to “work that much harder to engage the students because they're not always engaged in classes because they're hungry or they worked really late last night and they take care of siblings.” She wanted to ensure “that when [students] walk in the door they want to be there,” so she worked hard to “go, like, the extra mile” (Year 1, Interview 1). Dawn explained that she would not have chosen to be a Spanish teacher and that she would have selected a different content area, but that “TFA chose [Spanish] for her” (Year 1, Interview 1). She initially thought that she would just teach for 2 years, like many TFA teachers, but she explained that she “pretty quickly realized (…) education was for [her]” (Year 5 interview).
Shana
Shana's personal history and experiences were distinctly different from those of Dawn. Shana had grown up in New York before moving to North Carolina to attend a public university where she had majored in Spanish. When asked how she had learned Spanish, Shana explained that she learned from her aunt, who was Puerto Rican. Her aunt, whom she saw daily during her childhood, liked to “pretend as if she didn't [speak English] in public” (Year 1, Interview 1) so that Shana could translate for her. Because of her close relationship with her aunt, she studied Spanish in high school, and later passed the New York Regents Exam and decided to pursue Spanish as a major. When this investigation began, Shana was in her first year of teaching middle school Spanish at a suburban charter school, but she had taught Spanish for 2 years before at a private liberal arts college in North Carolina.
Interaction of personal histories with institutionalized struggles
Dawn: Unencumbered and overachieving in an underresourced school
Through TFA, Dawn had been placed in an urban Title I public high school in North Carolina. This school had its own institutionalized struggles shaped by the challenges of the teaching profession at large. The student population was 80% low income and 97% minority (50% African American, 40% Hispanic, and 7% other) and had an 80% graduation rate. Like other high poverty schools, teacher turnover was challenging, as was hiring licensed teachers. Dawn reflected on her first year at the school, stating, “I was in a trailer. I had, like, 37 kids in every class and it was tough. I had 7 students with IEPs [individualized education programs] in one class” (Year 1, Interview 1). The large class sizes and small classroom space made teaching difficult and almost caused Dawn to quit her first year. She stated that she felt like she “almost backed out with that first semester” (Year 1, Interview 1).
Related to her own personal history, Dawn attributed some of her initial difficulty to the mismatch between her and her TFA mentor. She stated that “how a middle-aged man talks to students is not how a 22-year-old is going to talk to students” (Year 5 interview). She learned that she needed to “discipline and manage and teach in [her] own way” and that “authenticity matters way more than what disciplinary words” (Year 5 interview) she used. Although she “didn't feel great at [teaching her] first year,” she found that it had an “almost addictive quality” and she “felt like [she] could be good at it” (Year 5 interview). By her third year, when she began student teaching, she stated that she felt more confident in the classroom.
Dawn's personal history as an overachiever collided with the institutionalized struggles in education systems to retain teachers while providing them with too few resources. This collision resulted in the contentious practice of accepting too many responsibilities without commensurate increases in pay. During her student-teaching internship, the principal asked Dawn to serve as chair of the world language department. That same semester, due to high teacher turnover, the school had brought over an individual from El Salvador to teach Spanish. This individual had never taught and did not have an instructional certification. Dawn, as the chair, was given the responsibility of providing this novice teacher with lesson plans and instructional materials. This pattern of responsibility to train untrained teachers continued in her subsequent years. In Year 3 of the study, Dawn emailed the first author in search of a teacher, writing, “I feel like I send you this same email every year, but do you know of anyone looking for a Spanish teaching position next school year?” (Year 3 email).
We would look for teachers from different countries…and they ended up being really big assets to our community at the time. But [their hiring] also comes with its own struggle, because you're on like a temporary work visa or you can only stay here for a couple years; you can't bring your family. (Year 5 interview)
You have teachers that teach a couple years and they're really burnt out because it's really hard because there's no support and no one [consistently] mentoring them and no one guiding them. And the teachers that were more experienced like were also burnt out in this school and didn't necessarily want to mentor. (Year 5 interview)
In her fifth year at the school, in addition to her role as department chair, Dawn also led student government, organized homecoming events and the prom, and chaired the school leadership team. During the summers, to supplement her low salary, Dawn coordinated for the national student leadership conference, which meant that she flew to Los Angeles each summer where she “essentially had a full-time job being, like, a summer school principal” (Year 5 interview). Dawn explained that it was “really frustrating” because she “was comparing what [she] was making to what [her] friends [were] making in different jobs” (Year 5 interview), where they did not work nearly as hard as she worked. By her 5th year, she had a master's degree, had been department chair for 3 years, and “was essentially making the same salary that [she] did as a 1st-year teacher” (Year 5 interview). In reflecting back on that time, Dawn explained that her “work–life balance [was] really horrible” (Year 5 interview). As a result, she decided to resign from her position and move back to the northeast for a Spanish teaching position. A year later, and because of her accomplished performance in the classroom, the administration of her new school district promoted her to the position of curriculum coordinator for all subject areas.
In summary, in addition to her language classes, Dawn participated in many aspects of school life, both in her building and beyond. Despite her intensive commitment to the profession, she lamented her low pay compared to teachers in other states. It was not surprising that the juxtaposition of her own historically formed identity with the uncontested historical practices of the institution produced contentiousness, which we will discuss later through the framework of history in person.
Shana: High expectations for marginalized subject without administrator support
Across town from Dawn, Shana taught middle and high school Spanish at a charter school in the suburbs. The charter school was 9% low income and 29% minority and had a 92% graduation rate. Shana's classes typically had 15−20 students. However, this more affluent school also struggled with teacher retention, especially in world languages. The students had had a variety of Spanish teachers and substitute teachers, many of whom were not certified and some of whom did not speak Spanish. When Shana tried to teach the assigned curriculum, she reported that parents complained, “This is not fair because they had five different Spanish teachers, they all quit. They never came back. They sat in class all day and did nothing” (Year 1, Interview 3).
Shana's personal history as an instructor at the college level clashed with the institutionalized struggle of teacher retention and the lack of support for student academic achievement. She had high expectations for her students that were not supported by parents or administration. Because of the long succession of unqualified teachers in their classes, the students were not accustomed to developing proficiency in Spanish, and therefore expected “high grades for not doing any work” (Year 1, Interview 3). Shana explained that her unwillingness to give students high grades for little work made the parents “livid.” They complained, “This is not fair. You're failing my kid,” to which Shana responded, “I'm not failing them, I'm grading according to what they did” (Year 1, Interview 3). Coming from the university level, Shana was accustomed to working with a motivated population of students. As a result, she explained that she was “used to dealing with older kids” and that her mind had trouble “adjusting to their age level” (Year 1, Interview 1). These circumstances resulted in a convergence of several points of conflict, such as student and parent expectations, the age of the students, and affective reactions to the context of middle and high school teaching compared to her experiences at the university.
An additional daily struggle that Shana faced was the administration's marginalization of Spanish as an academic content area. Shana was an itinerant teacher required to transport her teaching materials to different classrooms throughout the day. Everyone around her treated Spanish as a “special” and “not a heavy hitter” (Year 1, Interview 2). As an example of the administrative attitudes toward Spanish that Shana observed, during two of our four observations, other teachers or administrators interrupted the lesson, telling Shana that they would need her to move to another classroom. When asked about this, Shana said that Spanish was considered “a complete blow over” (Year 1, Interview 2) and described how she would teach in one classroom one day but another the next. She said, “It's just the way it's treated. It's like you're here one minute, you're thrown here, you're thrown there. It's all over the place. It's no direction. There's no consistent anything” (Year 1, Interview 3). It was also common for students to be pulled out of Spanish class for various other school commitments. She noted that the number of students “will fluctuate by tomorrow, and then by Wednesday, it will be something completely different” (Year 1, Interview 3).
This marginalization of Spanish resulted in Shana deciding to leave the school. She said that she “just couldn't professionally connect with how the school was directed” (Year 2 email). The final straw related to a student who “did nothing all year” but “wanted a passing grade in [her] class” (Year 2 email). She explained, “the principal set it up where he would get a Spanish 3 honor credit for my class, although he would technically be in Spanish 1” (Year 2 email). Despite this arrangement, the student “didn't do the [Spanish 1] work,” and when Shana assigned him a failing grade, “his mom began to fight for the fact that he shouldn't fail the course” (Year 2 email). Shana explained that she “couldn't do it,” which “didn't sit well with the principal” (Year 2 email). In the end, the principal invited her to return the following year, but she decided to look for other positions. Her beliefs as a teacher and in academic achievement conflicted with institutionalized administrative, parent, and student expectations, which in turn produced for her an untenable professional situation.
Leaving the Spanish classroom: Transformation and reorientation
Four years after their student teaching, both Dawn and Shana could no longer combat the institutionalized struggles that came with being Spanish teachers in these schools. Exhausted from the relentless tension and struggle of trying to reconcile their own histories and beliefs as educators and the policies of the schools in which they worked, they transitioned into other roles. Dawn moved to another state where teachers were union members and earned higher wages. When asked why she left, she explained, “I felt like my potential [was] kind of tapped there and that I couldn't reach another level beyond what I was already doing” (Year 5 interview). She explained that the revolving door of teachers and additional unpaid responsibilities led to “burn out for students and for me” (Year 5 interview). Her new school had a similar demographic to her school in North Carolina, but differed in the “valuing teacher piece” (Year 5 interview) and the possibility of promotions and salary increases. In North Carolina, she “had a master's degree by the time [she] left and had been department chair for 3 years,” but she “was essentially making the same salary that [she had] as a 1st-year teacher.” (Year 5 interview). She “had always done more than was asked” (Year 5 interview) without compensation. In her new state, Dawn earned supplemental wages for covering an additional class or tutoring. After only 1 year as a classroom teacher, and because of her expertise, her administration promoted her to the leadership role of curriculum coordinator for the entire school. Dawn accepted the position, even though she said it challenged her identity as a teacher. Dawn reflected, “I definitely strongly identify with being a teacher, which is why it's really scary for me to say I'm not a teacher at the moment” (Year 5 interview). She explained, “The scariest thing was when I was like, ‘I'm not a teacher. I'm a coordinator’” (Year 5 interview).
Shana's path was more complex than that of Dawn. Whereas Dawn persisted in the same school for 5 years before moving, Shana changed schools year to year in her search for a school that valued Spanish and her expertise as a Spanish teacher. After moving first to a college-level position and then to another charter school, Shana finally decided her only option was to change content areas. Her colleague became the head of a Title I public school and Shana followed to serve as an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher. She explained, “Spanish is just not taken seriously” and “that really impacted my decision with ESL” (Year 5 interview). She liked the idea of working with kids that “really wanted to learn English [and] that needed to learn English” (Year 5 interview). She thought that by working with emergent bilinguals, she would finally “be allowed to actually teach and do it” (Year 5 interview). Shana concluded by saying that with Spanish, she felt like she was just “babysitting all day dealing with behavioral issues all day with no support from administration” (Year 5 interview). When we reached out to Shana for the last time regarding this research, she was about to begin her second year at the same school as an ESL teacher, which she described as “going well” (Year 5 email).
DISCUSSION
This investigation followed the experiences, feelings, and cognitions of two Spanish teachers in North Carolina. Some research has suggested that teachers who leave the profession are categorically less effective than those who stay (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2010). However, the stories in the present study suggest that weak teaching performance was not the case for Shana and Dawn. Their decisions to change school districts and professional positions emerged from different sources—underresourced programs and undervalued classes. Dawn's personal history as an overachiever clashed with the institutional struggles of an underresourced school. In a field where teachers are already working more than their peers in other countries (Sparks, 2022), Dawn's workload increased each year as her administration gave her additional responsibilities. Dawn was not given mentorship specific to world language teaching during induction (Brown, 2001; Mason, 2017). Yet, she was asked early on in her career to be the department chair and mentor other new and untrained teachers. She was not compensated for these additional responsibilities and she ultimately left due to a stagnant salary, as many teachers report (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017), that left her feeling unappreciated. Like the teachers in Acheson et al. (2016), Dawn's “expenditure of effort” left her exhausted as she “continued to perform emotional labor against the backdrop of an unsupportive environment” (p. 531).
Shana's reasons for leaving the Spanish classroom were quite different from those of Dawn but can also be explained through the history-in-person framework (Holland & Lave, 2001, 2009). Shana's passion for Spanish clashed with the marginalization of Spanish as a content area in her school. As is common in so many Anglophone countries (Acheson et al., 2016; Mason, 2017; Swanson & Huff, 2010; Wilkerson, 2000), her administration and colleagues treated Spanish as a low-status and unimportant subject. The ways in which administration and other faculty marginalized Spanish was appropriated by the students themselves and their parents, who felt that Spanish should require little effort for a high grade. When tension resulted from these unaligned expectations, Shana's principal sided with parents instead of her. Shana felt neither the autonomy nor social support described in research on why teachers stay in the profession (Haukäs, 2024; Peng et al., 2024). Consistent with the existing literature, issues with school administration (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017; Nguyen et al., 2020), negative leadership style (Gillet et al., 2022), and student inattention (Gillet et al., 2022) influenced her decision to leave. In a field with such high teacher attrition and turnover (Murphy et al., 2003; U.S. Department of Education, 2015) and with so few Black teachers (Anya, 2020; Fenwick, 2022; Hill-Jackson, 2017), her departure represented a huge loss.
Bhaskar (2016) argued that the “presence of the past [is] built into our environments, institutions, problem-fields, practices, languages, and ideas” (p. 69). In the case of these two teachers, we saw clearly how focusing on only the individual or the structures in which they lived would limit our understanding of the dynamics of change, that is, how the career paths of these two individuals emerged from differing conditions of their professional lives (Donaldson & Woulfin, 2018). Although both teachers shared the common experience of learning a world language in the United States, where learning additional languages is shaped by language ideologies that permeate the country, each teacher presented unique and historically formed reactions to the individuals and institutions in which they worked, as described above.
IMPLICATIONS
First, researchers, policymakers, and school administrators must come together to brainstorm and pilot new programs to address teacher shortages that allow individuals to learn to teach in supportive environments with trained mentors. The teacher shortage crisis in the United States has fueled the creation of teacher residency programs that train and license teachers simultaneously with in-service full-time teaching. Such programs do not permit the university to choose the clinical site in which student teaching occurs. It is often those schools that are underresourced and struggle to retain teachers that hire unlicensed individuals to teach. In these cases, historically institutionalized struggles can profoundly impact teacher candidates working toward a teaching license and lead to high turnover. Additionally, working for a credential while simultaneously holding a full-time teaching position (as in the case of lateral entry and internships) can be stressful, if not in some cases, untenable. However, without lateral entry pathways in states like North Carolina, many schools would be forced to cease world language programming due to a lack of teachers. Stakeholders must come together to examine existing research on these programs that combine school-based full-time work with university study, pilot programs to better support existing teachers, and find ways to prepare new individuals in supportive environments to ensure their wellness.
Second, teacher preparation programs must develop in beginning teachers a growth mindset, a professional identity, and their own sense of agency (LaFrance & Rakes, 2022). Although teachers may not be able to easily change school-based or district-based conditions, they are also not categorically a victim of their circumstances. Although both Dawn and Shana experienced struggles between their personal histories and institutional histories, they each experienced a transformation and were able to pursue other, more satisfying options in the profession. Zeichner (2019) suggested that we “give teachers collectively a greater voice in the conceptualization and development of education policies” (p. 1). Developing in new teachers the capacity to act and influence the direction of their professional lives is a viable step to empowering teachers to navigate the often tumultuous waters of school systems with questionable language ideologies and instructional practices.
Third, as a field, we must continue our advocacy efforts to promote the importance, relevance, and benefits of world language education. The marginalization of world language education in the United States has made headlines recently with reports of low enrollments and program closures (Lusin et al., 2023; Pettit, 2023). While it is well documented that world language education is often marginalized at the national and state levels (Acheson et al., 2016; Mason, 2017; Swanson & Huff, 2010; Wilkerson, 2000), our findings suggest that such sentiments trickle down and permeate schools as well. The fractal-like connection of national social attitudes about language to school environments is concerning.
CONCLUSION
At a time when teacher retention is paramount, any discussion of retaining teachers must consider the dialectical relationship of individual and environment and the histories that are brought to and brought about through this interaction. It is not enough to only examine how an individual's history relates to or does not relate to the demands of the institutions in which they find themselves. Attention also must be paid to the institution's past and the enduring struggles that an institution deals with almost daily. From this perspective, individuals and institutions create a dialectical relationship where contact can create contentiousness, as we have shown in this study. The question remains, how can this cycle of historical struggle and contradictions change against the backdrop of studies that show that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement (Chetty et al., 2014)?
Although this study looked closely at the professional lives of two teachers in North Carolina, the findings are not restricted to this state. Examination of these two individuals through the historical conditions of their past experiences and expectations of the present and the instructional contexts in which they worked allowed for their unique stories to be told. In this way, the analysis maintained the integrity of the individual in context rather than assigning them the identity of an anonymous data point for statistical analysis in a large-scale study. Packer (2011), in his discussion of the contributions of Bourdieu to research, pointed out that “Bourdieu sought to avoid the dualisms that have dogged social science, such as individual/society, action/structure, and freedom/necessity” (p. 317). We maintain that the theory of history in person is one way to avoid these polar opposites and to view practice, what people do in their daily lives, as “outcomes between their characteristics (habitus) and those of the social framework they inhabit” (Packer, 2011, p. 318). This study provides an example of how the history that inhabits individuals and institutions produces contentious practice and may be consequential to an individual's agentive actions to current circumstances.
Finally, individuals are not victims of history, as our findings have shown. Although one cannot fully leave the past behind, the historical structures of the self and the social situations in which one lives are not immutable and can change over time (Holland et al., 1998). As LaFrance and Rakes (2022) stated, teachers can grow and change to meet their own professional needs and the needs of students. Dawn and Shana's self-making (Hiver, 2017) allowed them to transform and reorient themselves based on the available resources located in their professional lives, resulting in a productive and satisfying professional future. Analysis of teacher satisfaction, attrition, and threats to world language programs nationwide can benefit from understanding the specific situations that ignite contentiousness and dissatisfaction that the theory of history in person aptly shows. In the case of Dawn and Shana, we see how their resilience in the face of trying conditions resulted in professional transformations that satisfied their passion and commitment to education and to serving the needs of students. In this way, we can go beyond the obvious and delve more deeply into the interactions of person and institution, uncovering the conditions of conflict and struggle and the resilient acts of transformation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the support provided by the ACTFL-Middlebury Research Forum and the AELRC in the preparation of this manuscript.
