PAUL TARC 4. FULL-TIME TEACHERS’ LEARNING Engagements and Challenges INTRODUCTION Mary is an elementary school teacher with twenty years experience teaching in urban settings. She is critical of what she calls “data-driven” reform that moves the focus from supporting students’ learning in the classroom towards tasks which are more peripheral and wasteful of teachers’ time and energy. Accordingly, she reports that her work is intensifying in multiple ways because of increasing bureaucratic demands with diminishing resources available. Although a seasoned practitioner, she feels she still struggles to complete her responsibilities without working beyond a “nine hour" day. While she continues to want to take formal courses she is also more selective and quite critical of the lack of flexibility she encounters in professional development options. Mary finds that collaborations with a few close colleagues represent her main mode of learning. Cindy is also an elementary teacher in the same urban centre but with only eight years of teaching experience. She has moved rapidly through the phases of beginning teacher to curriculum leader and now is being trained to become a vice-principal; she is heavily engaged in both formal and informal modes of learning. Cindy too is aware of the data-driven reform pressures, but understands that it is not only top-down. She is aware that parents, including teachers, buy into accountability logics in the increasingly competitive school environment. She recognizes that much of her learning and approach to learning is shaped by these pressures and the need to respond to change. Arif is a secondary school teacher, also in the same urban centre. He has only been teaching for a few years and has thus far been transferred from school to school and been required to teach a range of subjects in each of his early years of full-time contract teaching. He has come into the profession of teaching relatively late in his life. Arif might be seen as a kind of idealized ‘lifelong learner’ and less securely employed. He has multiple degrees and courses in education, including a doctorate and extensive computer training. Given his more transitive employment he moves from one steep learning curve to another; in each setting he seeks out and values greatly collaboration with his colleagues. While also reflective of the changing working conditions, he is much more deeply affected by these changed realities. R. Clark et al. (eds.), Teacher Learning and Power in the Knowledge Society, 87–108. © 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.