Shifting from Stories to Live by to Stories to Leave By: Early Career Teacher Attrition.

Introduction We began this research by asking questions about the high number of teachers who leave teaching in their first five years of teaching. The literature on early career teacher attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Guarino, Santibanez & Daly, 2006; Macdonald, 1999; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004) left us with wonders around the experiences of teachers who leave. The storied experiences of those who leave appear absent, for the most part, in the literature. In order to hear the stories of the experiences of early career teacher leavers we engaged in a narrative inquiry with four teachers who left teaching in their first five years. We are researchers, who are also teachers who have left classrooms. The stories of these early career leavers resonated strongly with us. As we engaged in the study, we awakened to how the early career teacher leavers' stories shifted and changed with each conversation, as the research conversations allowed them to make sense of their experiences with leaving. A Story Fragment We begin with a story fragment from a narrative account (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) with Natalie, one of the early career leavers that Jean worked alongside. As shown in Natalie's story fragment below, the conversations were imbued with emotion, with regret, and with tension, as her stories to live by shifted to stories to leave by (Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009). I (Jean) sit at the small table in my office across from a striking young woman. I call her Natalie. We are talking about her experience of leaving K-12 teaching after only four years. She wipes tears from her eyes and I know this is a difficult conversation for her. She tells of coming to Canada as a small child with her parents, of speaking a language other than English, of being identified early as someone who needed help, and of working with an academic tutor through her elementary and junior high school years in order to do well in school. She tells of going into the sciences when she entered university. She also tells of living within a family story in which she needs to have a career. In order to live up to, or to live out, that family story (Carr, 1986), she tells of her decision to take a dual degree, one where she could earn both a B.Sc and a B.Ed. As her stories unfold over several conversations, I come to know more and more of Natalie's experiences, her stories of her experiences of coming to teaching, and of teaching. At first she tells stories with lightness. Natalie tells a story of herself as a good teacher who knew her subject matter, was asked to participate in school and government curriculum committees, and was able to help her students learn the subject matter she loved. Natalie was given a tenured position early, a sign of the high regard of her school district. As she said, So one of the reasons I still kept going to work and was relatively happy was cause I loved being in the classroom. I loved the interactions there. Different things would happen every day ... so different dynamic things happen and I like that. That's why I loved the classrooms. (Natalie, personal communication, February 13, 2012) Natalie also tells of working closely with a small group of colleagues over many hours and weeks to devise an innovative approach to curriculum and how much she enjoyed this work with colleagues. Then, as we came to know more of each other through further conversations, there are more tears as she tells of her experiences of leaving K-12 teaching. These are hard to tell stories, stories she has not told before in the smoothed over, cover story of how she left teaching to come to graduate studies. She tells of how she and her colleagues were not recognized for their innovative work but that someone else was given the credit. She describes how she was unable to even arrange an appointment to tell the recently appointed principal of the high school where she was teaching that she was resigning. …

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