Teachers' plight and trainees' flight: Perceived, lived, and conceived spaces of schools

Abstract

Teacher recruitment and retention are often examined as technical problems that can be solved by providing teachers with incentives, evaluations, or more practical initial preparation. This paper proposes a reconceptualization of pre-service teachers' flight from the profession. By applying Lefebvre's (1991) theory of space to the analysis of ethnographic data collected in the Russian Federation between 2011 and 2014, this paper highlights how the teachers' plight in schools and in society at large shapes student teachers' career aspirations. Based on classroom observations and focus group data, as well as media artifacts, I show that the perceived, lived, and conceived spaces of schooling hold little promise for students in teacher education programs. Teachers' pay, their work structures, and students' attitudes towards teachers reveal that schools have come to occupy a peripheral position in Russian society. Teachers' experiences in schools, as managed professionals burdened with bureaucratic responsibilities and undergoing significant amounts of stress, make teaching a precarious occupation. Representations of schools and teachers' work in the media and public service announcements portray schools as irrelevant and immoral spaces where only "losers" go to work. In this situation, meaningful educational change would require both a reimagining of the spaces of schooling and a collective dialogue on the role education should play in Russian society.