Conference Program

This paper analyses teacher education, recruitment and retention policies in Portugal through a sociological lens that treats “shortage” not only as a technical mismatch between supply and demand but as a policy problem constructed through specific frames, instruments and temporalities. Building on national diagnosis of an ageing workforce and projected retirement pressures, we argue that policy responses have tended to be organized around short-horizon measures, designed to stabilize staffing in the present—rather than around integrated, prospective workforce planning that aligns initial teacher education capacity, induction, career structures and working conditions (Conselho Nacional de Educação [CNE], 2024). We conceptualize this pattern as a technocratic policy orientation in the sense of governing through instruments. It privileges managerial levers, quantification and rapid regulatory adjustments that render the profession “manageable” while leaving less visible the relational, institutional and political conditions that shape professional commitment and career continuity. International evidence on teacher shortages and retention stresses that sustainable solutions require system-wide strategies centred on professional support, decent working conditions and coherent career governance, reinforcing the limits of reactive approaches (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2025; UNESCO, 2024). Methodologically, the paper undertakes qualitative analysis of official reports and policy documents to trace how teacher supply is narrated, which instruments are prioritized, and what assumptions about professionalism and responsibility underpin policy choices. By linking policy temporality (short-term responsiveness versus long-term planning) with policy rationality (technocratic instrumentality versus professional and democratic governance), results reveal that “quick fixes” may contribute to cyclical instability and transfer responsibility to schools and teachers, undermining retention. We conclude by arguing for the need for a more prospective democratic governance architecture where education, recruitment, retention and wellbeing are treated as structurally interconnected dimensions of professional sustainability.

As the teaching profession faces unprecedented challenges—ranging from systemic shortages to the digital transformation of the classroom—this panel contribution argues that the crisis of teacher well-being cannot be resolved through individual psychological interventions. Instead, drawing on the collaborative framework of the Erasmus+ "Connecting Teachers" project (2025–2028), we propose that well-being and professional identity must be reimagined as relational constructs embedded within institutional cultures.

The discussion centers on the necessity of moving beyond the "technical-rationality" model of teaching, which reduces the profession to the implementation of pre-defined protocols and accountability metrics. Following Schön (1983), we advocate for the recovery of the "Reflective Practitioner." In this view, professional identity is not a static set of credentials but a dynamic process of "reflection-in-action." By embracing the uncertainty of the "swampy lowlands" of practice, teachers can reclaim their role as autonomous professionals capable of navigating the emotional and structural complexities of modern schools.

However, to ensure that reflection does not lead to self-blame or isolation, this contribution emphasizes the role of the community. Using Brookfield’s (2017) framework for "becoming a critically reflective teacher," we explore how the development of Communities of Practice (CoP) allows for a collective interrogation of the profession. By viewing their work through the "four lenses"—autobiography, students' eyes, colleagues' perceptions, and theoretical literature—teachers can identify and challenge the hegemonic assumptions that lead to burnout and alienation.

This contribution invites a comparative reflection on how European higher education and teacher training programs can foster these "spaces of encounter." The goal is to move from a culture of performance to a culture of shared inquiry. By reframing well-being as a byproduct of collective agency and critical reflexivity, we can renew the social foundations of the teaching profession, positioning schools not just as sites of instruction, but as resilient communities of practice that sustain the democratic identity of the educator.

Within a European context marked by teacher shortages and the intensification of professional burnout (OECD, 2023; UNESCO, 2024), this exploratory study draws on pragmatic sociology (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2006). Its analysis interprets the findings as expressions of different modes of teachers’ engagement with their professional activity and with the institutional frameworks that regulate it. The most consistent form of engagement remains anchored in the concrete pedagogical relationship, in everyday cooperation, and in care for students— a commitment sustained by situated practices and ethical responsibility. However, this core is traversed by institutional dynamics shaped by performance metrics, accountability mechanisms, and bureaucratic intensification, which tend to misalign the pedagogical meaning of the profession from formal criteria of recognition.

This paper presents the results of an initial questionnaire developed within the framework of the DRAFTER project – Building Teachers’ Vocation for the 21st Century. The study is based on a survey administered to principals of School Clusters (Agrupamentos de Escolas) and Non-Clustered Schools in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, seeking to analyse school leaders’ perceptions of teachers’ professional engagement, well-being, and the conditions for valuing the profession.

The analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative data, enables the construction of an integrated reading of school leaders’ perceptions of teaching. The findings indicate high levels of collaboration among teachers, low levels of professional isolation, and a consistent openness to addressing students’ difficulties. At the same time, they reveal frequent references to accumulated fatigue, bureaucratic pressure, salary dissatisfaction, and the symbolic weakening of teachers’ authority. Open-ended responses converge in identifying priorities such as salary enhancement, improved working conditions, and strengthened social recognition of the profession. Taken together, these elements do not point to a generalized erosion of vocation, but rather to a reconfiguration of professional engagement within institutional contexts marked by increasing demands and insufficient recognition.

In sum, teacher well-being emerges as a relational and organisational phenomenon, produced in everyday interactions and professional cultures rather than as a merely individual variable. Within the context analysed, teaching appears as a vocation under strain yet not annulled: commitment to students and to the professional collective remains active, although conditioned by structures that challenge the sustainability of engagement and call for renewed forms of institutional and public recognition.

Over the past five years in Canada, and globally, the teacher’s role in education—long recognized as crucial—has grown more complex. Rapid technological change, a global pandemic, and recruitment and retention difficulties have resulted in an increasingly stressed workforce (Awde, 2024). At the same time, unprecedented global migration (UNHCR, 2025) has reshaped classrooms, creating newly culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learning environments that require teachers to navigate complex identity and belonging dynamics. In New Brunswick (NB), a province located in Atlantic Canada, for example, in 2017, students came from 40 countries; by 2024, they represented 150 countries, and the overall student population had increased by 20% (GNB, 2025). What have teachers experienced in this rapidly evolving context?

Little is known about how teachers’ identities develop in newly CLD environments and how well-being and practice might be affected (Gregersen et al., 2020). Growing cultural and linguistic diversity has been identified as a key challenge (Aydin, 2023; Yildirim, 2019), yet the literature on teachers' experiences in CLD environments reveals variation in beliefs, experiences, and recommendations. Strain and tension, often connected to low self-efficacy and/or deep value misalignment (for example, see: Acheson et al., 2016; Babaii et al., 2020; Nazari et al., 2022; Peterson & Jenson, 2025), can lead to disillusionment, burnout, or leaving the profession (Ben-Said, 2014). Recent literature, however, has shown that this tension can also stoke agentive action for change (Betancurt & Gallego, 2025; Tekin, 2024; Truong et al., 2025; Yuan & Burns, 2017). Recognizing that a research and narrative focus on damage in complex systems has not amounted to change (Tuck, 2009), it is evident that teachers must consider how to remain aligned with their values as a form of resistance and sustenance in an increasingly complex role.

In this presentation, I argue that the phenomenon of teacher joy, which I conceptualize as deep and positive alignment with self and personal praxis, is a potential way through and beyond stressed systems. Joy - agentic, relational, collective, and politically situated (Ahmed, 2017; Emmons, 2020; Muhammad, 2023) - is often expressed through culture and language, making it deeply important in CLD environments as a democratic force that embraces diversity, fights assimilation, and inspires change. To discuss this phenomena of teacher joy, I draw on a critical literature review, a theoretical framework grounded in Black, feminist and Indigenous theories of knowledge that reject pathologizing narratives and embrace complexity (Belcourt, 2020; hooks, 2001; Lorde, 2007), and a sociocultural consciousness that believes that humanizing pedagogical practices like translanguaging open space for identities to flourish (Koyama & Kasper, 2022; Nieto, 2013). I also draw on reflexive commentary emerging from my experiences as a first-generation high school graduate-turned-teacher, teacher leader, and teacher educator in a rapidly diversifying rural Canadian province to discuss the rationale and methodology for my upcoming research on teacher joy in newly CLD learning environments. The pedagogy of joy I describe is grounded in feminist resistance, collective reflexivity, and communities of practice.

This contribution presents an ongoing study on students' utopias, conducted as part of a postdoctoral research project at the Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) under the supervision of Séverine Chauvel. It engages with this panel's central questions by approaching professional teacher identity not from the perspective of practitioners already in the field, but from that of students whose social imaginaries sketch, in negative, a redefinition of the symbolic and relational foundations of the teaching profession.
The study seeks to understand how utopian imaginaries are grounded in ordinary experience, placing actors in situations of incongruence between their ideals and their practices (Mannheim, 2006). Conducted with students at UPEC — 25 interviews completed out of a target of 50 — enrolled in social science programmes preparing for careers in local government, community education, and teaching, it draws on the photo-elicitation method (Bigando, 2013; Michelin, 1998). Photography plays a central methodological role: it ensures grounding in participants' everyday lives by inviting them to capture and objectify what they perceive daily without always putting it into words (Bajard & El Miri, 2024). Participants are asked to take a series of photographs documenting an everyday situation — an object, a landscape, an interaction — that provokes, to them, either attraction or repulsion. These photographic acts allow them to identify situations that are often "seen but unnoticed." This grounding work then leads to an elicitation interview, during which participants explain the reasons behind their photographic choices and articulate, from their individual and sensory experiences, as-yet-unrealised social aspirations. Photography anchors lived experience; the interview reveals its meaning by making visible the forms of social imagination that underlie it.
Unlike strategic projections on plausible professional futures — shaped by parental expectations and competencies (Duru-Bellat, 2024) — students’ imaginaires here go beyond instrumental rationality and career strategies. Yet, these imaginaries remain predominantly positive, echoing findings from youth studies which show that young people tend to maintain a strong sense of optimism about their personal futures, grounded in perceptions of resources, agency and individual responsibility (Keating & Melis, 2021). In this sense, students’ utopian aspirations resonate with liberal and neoliberal valorizations of individual agency and self-realisation (Visanich, 2020). At the same time, they articulate an internal critique of this model, particularly with regard to the role that teaching should play in supporting collective emancipation rather than merely individual success. It is precisely within this critique that emerges a reimagined conception of teaching. Teaching thus occupies a singular place in these imaginaires. Students project onto it a vision of the teacher grounded not in statutory authority, but in relational authority (Aspelin, 2023), sustained by the capacity to foster critical reflexivity and to accompany students' emancipation.