This book presents new insights into the success strategies of Australian teachers. It analyses interviews with 42 experienced teachers across a range of school contexts to examine “what works” in those contexts. The authors organise teachers’ work and identities around ten distinct roles: designers for learning, emotional labourers, narrative constructors and deconstructors, pandemic navigators, policy refractors, relationship brokers, self-regulated learners, situated ethicists, teaching idealists and technology reframers.

The chapters explore two separate but interrelated arcs of analysis simultaneously. Teachers’ work is examined around four nodes: complexities, challenges, contradictions and comforts. Five dimensions of that work are considered as well: psychosocial; profession and professionalism; changes and continuities; naming, framing and shaming; and teaching by design. The Australian study is part of a five-nation international research project focused on teacher motivation and resilience, with the other countries including Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Spain. The authors are affiliated with the University of Southern Queensland, Central Queensland University and the Queensland University of Technology.

What emerges is the understanding that Australian teachers acknowledge the challenging complexity of their work, while they mobilise their constrained agency in innovative ways in diverse contexts. Their success strategies cluster around four distinct types—value-driven, agentic, adaptable and relational—with important implications for current and future teachers alike. It is an essential read for both in-service and pre-service teachers, as well as a viable resource for education researchers and research students, and general lay readers with an interest in the future of education.

"The book provides a reflection quality, writ large, where the authors and teachers they interviewed offer a tantalising narrative for teacher education, interweaving scholarship and teachers’ voices while describing insights that extend complexities and clarify contradictions (e.g., actions), challenges (e.g., policy), and comforts (e.g., institutions). The book is an asset to the international NARRES project providing Australia as context, highlighting resilience (variously), and offering a strong example of narrative as reflection both theoretically and practically."

Associate Professor Robert C. Kleinsasser, Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University, United States; Co-Editor-in-Chief of Teaching and Teacher Education (2019–2024)

"This book is both a celebration of teachers and teaching and a sophisticated analysis and evaluation of the current zeitgeist of the profession. A ‘must-read’ for aspiring teachers and those who work beside them."

Associate Professor Glenda McGregor, Deputy Head of School (Learning & Teaching), School of Education & Professional Studies, Griffith University, Australia

Karen L. Peel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is an experienced teacher, having taught in Australian schools across decades of educational transformations. Her research interests include implementing practices for effective teaching and self-regulated learning.

Deborah L. Mulligan is an Honorary Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include gerontology, where she has published on older men and suicide ideation. Deborah has a strong interest in community capacity-building through examining marginalised societal cohorts.

R. E. (Bobby) Harreveld is Professor Emerita at Central Queensland University, Australia. Her interests include socio-cultural understandings of education in diverse contexts; research education and ethics (politics, theory, practice); professional and vocational education and employment transition pathways; and distance, open and online teaching and learning.

Nick Kelly is Associate Professor in Design Science in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He conducts interdisciplinary research across the fields of design and education, with a focus upon design cognition and design science in teacher education and schooling.

Patrick Alan Danaher is Professor in Education in the School of Education at Excelsia University College, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. His research interests include academics’, educators’ and researchers’ work and identities, and education research ethics, methods, politics and theories.