Primary Teachers Talking : A Study of Teaching As Work

An extraordinarily vivid account, based on primary teachers' own words, of what it means "to feel like a teacher".

What is it like to be a primary teacher? The first detailed study of the personal and professional experience of primary teachers in England and Wales, Primary Teachers Talking makes extensive use of verbatim evidence supplied by teachers during interviews in their first decade of work and again ten years later. In Part I Jennifer Nias discusses the importance attached to the ways in which primary teachers see themselves and the main dimensions of that self-image. In Part II, she examines the subjective experience of ''being a primary teacher'', looking at the main factors which contribute to job satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and at teachers'' relationships with their colleagues. She shows that to ''feel like a teacher'' is to learn to live with dilemma, contradiction and paradox and - at its best - to experience in their resolution the creative satisfactions of the artist.