Uniting Teachers Through Critical Language Awareness: a Role for the Early Career Framework?

In this paper, we make initial advances towards building an argument for the inclusion of Critical Literacy Awareness within the new Early Career Framework in England. Using illustrative examples from recent research projects, we argue that post-2010 education policy has discursively divided practitioners, structuring relationships between different groups of teachers in schools as hierarchical and competitive, rather than collegial and supportive. We argue that such hierarchies may be a contributing factor to the teacher retention crisis, given that research indicates teachers working in schools with a collegial culture are more likely to remain committed and motivated. We propose that engagement with CLA may enable early career teachers to critique and resist dominant discourses which differentiate and hierarchically divide them from their colleagues, and therefore, the utility of CLA should be explored within future iterations of the Early Career Framework.