The Playing Teacher project: a card game to encourage dialogue about professional identity with early career teachers
FORUM - Print ISSN 1474-7685 - Online ISSN 2047-7171
Volume 67 Number 2 (2025)
The Playing Teacher project: a card game to encourage dialogue about professional identity with early career teachers
Kathryn Spicksley pages 77‑87
DOI: 10.3898/forum.2025.67.2.07
Abstract
The Playing Teacher project is a playful – yet serious – response to the teacher supply crisis currently experienced by schools in England. The project seeks to develop a set of cards which can be used by those supporting new teachers to open up spaces to talk about ‘becoming a teacher’. In doing so, the project aims to create dialogic spaces where dominant cultural and political images of the teacher can be challenged and, if necessary, resisted. In this article, I argue that providing such dialogic spaces is important for the mental well-being of teachers, whose expectations when entering the profession are often at odds with the reality of becoming a teacher within the current neoliberal, performative education environment.
To cite this article
Kathryn Spicksley (2025) The Playing Teacher project: a card game to encourage dialogue about professional identity with early career teachers, FORUM, 67(2), 77-87 . https://doi.org/10.3898/forum.2025.67.2.07