Selective rebels: the art of being a teacher - a mulitmedia exploration of how teachers navigate their own values and morals in the current policy climate using IPA

The teaching profession in England is currently facing a significant crisis; research has shown that teachers are leaving the profession at increasing rates. This study aims to explore how teachers navigate their own values and professionalism in the current policy climate. Building on previous research that uses interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), it asks how IPA can be used to explore participants’ responses to images and art in educational research.

Based on a review of the literature on the relationship between teachers and policy which suggested that policy was creating an unsustainable work environment for teachers, a question was posed to teachers from three secondary schools via email circulation, in which they were asked to use an image that best describes how they navigate their own values and professionalism in the current policy climate and to include a short narrative outlining why they chose that image. These images from the nine responses received were then discussed in a focus group and sent to an artist who created an artefact from the images alone. The participants were then given the opportunity to respond to the artefact in a further focus group.

The findings offered in this research suggest the existence of selective rebellion for these teacher participants. While there needs to be a greater autonomy within the teaching profession, these teachers are carving out their own path to a journey of discovery within the profession that both embraces and subjugates policy. The teacher participants in this research never once spoke of stress or burnout, a theme which pervaded the literature, instead they explored the ways in which they managed to thrive in their professional world by quietly subjugating policy. This prompted a reflexive response from the researcher, herself a secondary school teacher.

This study has also demonstrated that risk taking in educational research and the exploration of creative methods can result in the creation of rich data that has the capacity to allow for the growth of the researcher and the participants. Taking risks and moving away from traditional methods and pushing the boundaries of established methodologies is something that can be both celebrated and encouraged in education research.