A teaching contract does more than set pay and working hours. It can quietly decide who is treated as a full member of the profession, who feels entitled to speak, and who is left waiting for legitimacy. A recent study of temporary English language teachers in Türkiye brings this often-overlooked side of teacher professional identity into sharp focus.
The paper is especially relevant to wider conversations about teaching and pedagogy because it shifts attention away from individual resilience and toward the employment structures surrounding teachers.
Summary of the Study
Yılmaz and colleagues explored how three newly qualified, hourly paid English teachers negotiated their professional identities during their first year in Turkish state schools. The researchers conducted individual online interviews and analysed the teachers’ accounts thematically.
Their framework connected identity with school participation, relationships, career expectations, and the wider labour system. This matters because professional identity is too often discussed as a personal mindset, even though recognition and belonging are also produced by institutions.
Across the interviews, temporary status repeatedly weakened the teachers’ sense of legitimacy. They described uncertainty about whether they belonged in meetings and professional events, discomfort when students questioned their status, unequal pay and benefits, and reluctance to raise workplace concerns.
Their qualifications and classroom responsibilities did not protect them from being positioned as substitutes or lesser professionals. The paper makes a persuasive case that insecurity reaches beyond income: it shapes how teachers understand their worth and whether they can imagine a future in the profession.
The teachers were not passive. They sought help from colleagues and former teacher educators, tried to establish credibility through their work, and treated temporary teaching as experience that might lead to permanent employment.
Yet the authors offer a useful challenge to the familiar language of resilience and self-improvement. When teachers cope by turning insecurity into an individual investment project, they may survive the arrangement while the arrangement itself escapes scrutiny. Calling this agency should not obscure how narrow their choices were.
The study is exploratory, and its claims need to remain proportionate to its evidence. It draws on one interview with each of three young women, all qualified English teachers in their first year of work. Their accounts illuminate a problem but cannot show how common these experiences are, how gender or socioeconomic background changes them, or how identities develop over time.
The neoliberal framing is compelling, although a wider sample and evidence from administrators, permanent colleagues, and school observations would help test whether every tension attributed to contract status operates in the same way.
Practical Insights
This paper does not offer a classroom technique in the usual sense. Its practical value lies in showing how schools and teacher education programmes can stop making temporary teachers carry a structural problem alone.
- Make belonging explicit. Invite temporary teachers to meetings, ceremonies, planning conversations, and professional learning by default. They should not have to ask whether they count.
- Pair support with equal professional recognition. Mentoring can help beginning teachers, but it should not cast qualified temporary staff as perpetual trainees. Give them access to the same instructional resources, development opportunities, and professional voice as permanent colleagues.
- Discuss precarious work in teacher education. Candidates need an honest view of contract types, workplace rights, financial pressures, and possible transition shocks. A useful seminar activity could ask students to examine a temporary-teaching scenario at three levels: the teacher’s available choices, the school’s responsibilities, and the policy conditions producing the situation.
- Create safe routes for raising concerns. Clear contacts and confidential reporting processes can make it easier to ask about delayed pay, workload, or exclusion without fearing that a fragile contract will be jeopardised.
- Study trajectories, not snapshots. Researchers could follow temporary teachers across several years and compare contract types, genders, subjects, regions, and support networks. Including observations and interviews with colleagues and leaders would also help distinguish institutional practices from individual perceptions.
The central lesson is uncomfortable but necessary: schools cannot build a strong profession while maintaining a class of teachers whose belonging remains conditional. Professional identity develops through practice, but also through recognition, security, and the right to participate fully.
Reference
Yılmaz, F., Çiftçi, E. Y., Elmas, T., & Karaman, A. C. (2026). Precarious times for the teaching profession: How do temporary language teachers negotiate their professional identities? Cambridge Journal of Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2026.2714964
