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‘I Really Want To Make A Difference For These Kids But It’S Just Too Hard’: One Aboriginal Teacher’S Experiences Of Moving Away, Moving On And Moving Up, Ninetta Santoro

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

This paper draws on longitudinal data to examine the changing professional identity of one beginning teacher over a three-year period. Using a post-structuralist framework and theories of social class and capital, I highlight the complexities, contradictions and impossibilities of new graduate, Luke, sustaining an identity as ‘Aboriginal teacher’ in Australian schools. I trace the shift in his commitment to working with underachieving Aboriginal boys in challenging school contexts at the beginning of his career, to his move into a middle-class white girls’ school towards the end of his third year of teaching. I suggest this was a result of the …