Conference Agenda

Research indicates that nearly 44% of beginning teachers exit the profession within the initial five years (Ingersoll et al., 2018). Some of the reasons teachers leave their jobs include job satisfaction, burnout, and financial circumstances. It has been noted that the biggest reason for leaving jobs in public schools is stress (Diliberti et al 2021). However, the reasons for teachers leaving their jobs in private schools, where they earn higher salaries or have better conditions compared to other schools, are unknown. Examining the underlying reasons for teachers who do not leave their jobs due to financial or stress-related reasons is essential for the future sustainability of the teaching profession. This gap suggests that teacher attrition cannot be fully explained by external or material conditions alone and calls for a deeper examination of the pedagogical and professional structures shaping teachers’ experiences. In this context, John Dewey’s conceptualization of education as a form of “constructive engineering” provides a useful lens, emphasizing teaching as an intentionally designed and evolving practice that cultivates new competencies in teachers (Dewey, 2009). Building on this perspective, the present study employs a learning engineering framework to investigate the processes and experiences of teachers who leave the preschool teaching profession. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to examine in depth the processes and experiences of teachers who leave the preschool teaching profession and pursue different career choices. In accordance with this aim, the present study addresses the following research question:

1. What are the lived experiences of preschool teachers who leave the profession and pursue alternative careers?

Teacher shortages have, over the years, become one of the key issues in most educational systems, affecting both the development of educational policy and the daily functioning of educational institutions (Symeonidis et al., 2025). The recent UNESCO Global Report on Teachers addressing the shortage indicates that 44 million teachers are needed in primary and secondary education in order to achieve SDG-4 (UNESCO & International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, 2024).

Against this backdrop, researchers have increasingly focused on teachers’ sense of autonomy as a potential lever for improving teachers job satisfaction and consequently job retention. Autonomy is commonly defined as an individual’s sense of volition, choice, and self-endorsement of action, reflecting the extent to which one experiences one’s behaviour as self-congruent and meaningful (Ryan & Deci, 2017). However, as Vangrieken et al. (2017) note, autonomy in educational research has often been interpreted through a predominantly individualistic lens – emphasising independence, resistance to external influence, and self-governance. This understanding, described as reactive autonomy, foregrounds individualism rather than collaboration.

An alternative conceptualisation, increasingly visible in recent literature, frames autonomy as inherently relational. This perspective, referred to as reflective autonomy, emphasises interdependence and the freedom to self-govern and make personal choices in relation to one's feelings and values (Vangrieken et al., 2017). Such an understanding is more closely aligned with Self-Determination Theory, which conceptualises autonomy and relatedness as mutually reinforcing rather than competing needs. From this viewpoint, teachers’ autonomy is not diminished—but rather supported—through collaboration. By seeking social support from school principals and colleagues, teachers build meaningful professional relationships and experience a stronger sense of connection at work (Maas et al., 2022). Empirical studies demonstrate the benefits of collaboration and support-seeking, including increased job satisfaction (Tims et al., 2013) and greater fulfillment of the need for relatedness (Bakker & Oerlemans, 2019).

However, given the diversity of national and organisational cultures, it cannot be assumed that reflective and reactive autonomy relate to teacher retention in the same way across different countries. Motivation for the profession is shaped, among other factors, by the alignment between individuals’ needs and values and the norms, expectations, and forms of support embedded in their sociocultural environment. From this perspective, teachers’ experiences of reactive and reflective autonomy, and their relationship with teacher retention, are likely to be culturally situated rather than universally equivalent. To capture these contextual differences, the study draws on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, focusing on individualism–collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 2011). These dimensions were selected because they are conceptually linked to how autonomy and social relationships are structured in educational settings. Furthermore, the inclusion of these dimensions is supported by previous research demonstrating that power distance orientation affects the relationship between perceived autonomy and burnout (Guo et al., 2023), individualism and uncertainty avoidance influence job satisfaction (Jang et al., 2018), and collectivist cultures in learning contexts favour collaboration, while individualist cultures emphasise independence (Ouyang, 2025).

Building on these considerations, this study is aimed at examining the relationship between teachers’ job satisfaction—used as a proxy for teacher retention—and their sense of autonomy in teaching and openness to collaboration with other colleagues within school. We further investigated whether these relationships are shaped by the cultural characteristics of the country in which teachers work. To address this aim, the study was guided by the following research questions:

RQ1. Which distinct clusters of teachers can be identified based on autonomy in teaching and the exchange of information and ideas among teachers?
RQ2. Does the distribution of teacher clusters vary across cultural groups?
RQ3. Do teacher clusters differ in job satisfaction, and do these differences vary across cultural groups?

Sustainable employability (SE) – which can best be defined as the ability of workers to, throughout their working lives, keep participating in the labour market now and in the future in ways that safeguard their health and welfare (e.g., Hazelzet et al., 2019; van der Klink et al., 2016) – is an important European concern that defines the future of both the European labour market and European public health (de Rijk & Bültmann, 2025). Many people face increasing difficulties in engaging with the labour market in sustainable ways. This is due to an increasingly complex interplay of various societal, economic, and political developments taking place in Europe, such as demographic changes, welfare state austerity, the extension of the pension age, and changes in work methods (e.g., digitalization and robotization). These structural barriers make it difficult for large swaths of individuals, especially marginalised groups, to engage with work in sustainable ways (de Rijk & Bültmann, 2025; Grau-del-Valle et al., 2025; Hazelzet et al., 2019).

Lifelong learning initiatives have been suggested to solve these problems (e.g., Quendler & Lamb, 2016). SE has therefore also become a concern for educational researchers (Álvarez-González et al., 2024; Grau-del-Valle et al., 2025; Meerman et al., 2022), who explore how education might support individuals in positioning themselves in the labour market in good and healthy ways.

However, the relation between education and SE is complex and often fraught. Education is both assumed to play a significant role in enabling sustainable participation in the labour market (Álvarez-González et al., 2024; Grau-del-Valle et al., 2025) and understood as necessarily limited in its capacity to influence SE. What education can exactly contribute to SE, then, remains unclear in current discourse.

It is not our aim to simply critique this current state of SE research. Rather, we work from the assumption that research on SE might obscure the communal educational processes of value-making and experience that are already taking place in workplaces throughout Europe, and through which people come to experience their work as valuable as part of a labour community. Here, educational refers to the ongoing processes through which people learn what matters in their work, how to hold on to it, and how to act together in ways that give their labour meaning.

In this paper, we focus on the concept of valuable work as part of SE and argue that an educational approach is able to acknowledge both individual lived experience and its communal context. To do so, we turn to the lens of “educational obstinacy” as a way of understanding and articulating how value is made and experienced in workplaces.

Obstinacy, as a philosophical concept, is part of a long research tradition but has gained recent attention in educational research (Biesta, 2016; Torenbosch, 2025). Although obstinacy, in a traditional sense, might mean “to foolishly resist” change, orders, or requests, in this research, “obstinacy” does not mean refusing to work with others or stubbornly resisting change. Rather, it is an affirmative act: an effort to hold on to what is important to the community of actors who work together to create specific labour practices and, in doing so, deal with the challenges they face while keeping hold of what they create as shared value in the work they do (Biesta, 2019; Torenbosch, 2025; Sandel, 2020).

Therefore, rather than placing value-making as either an individual disposition or as part of workplace interventions, obstinacy directs attention to the communal educational processes through which value is made in already existing everyday labour practices.

The topic of human agency in transforming towards sustainable future and circular economy (CE) has gained increasing attention, as sustainability transitions do not appear merely through macro-level decisions and strategy planning but through micro level individual efforts, practices and interactions in real life work contexts (Alkki et al. 2025). Learning and human agency thus constitutes a central mechanism through which organizational change becomes possible (Koistinen et al., 2022; Subramanian & Suresh, 2022) and it has also found to fuel transition to the circular economy(Teerikangas et al. 2023. Within private corporate sectors learning has traditionally been conceptualized primarily through human resource (HR) theories as human capital that can be strategically managed to enhance competitiveness and productivity (e.g. Swanson, 2022). This perspective has tended to emphasize formal education, training programs, and planned competence development initiatives. At the same time, there is extensive research showing that the majority of adult learning takes place informally in everyday work through problem-solving, interaction, experimentation and participation in everyday work practices (e.g. Yeo, 2008). Despite this, such learning often remains invisible and underutilized, particularly in corporate contexts (De Grip, 2024).

Brandi and Iannone (2020) conceptualize learning at workplace contexts through two dominant theoretical traditions: an HR approach and a workplace learning (WPL) approach. The HR approach views learning mainly instrumentally, as a means to achieve organizational goals and performance outcomes. WPL approach instead is grounded in socio-cultural and practice-based perspectives that emphasize learning as a meaningful, situated, and relational human process embedded in everyday work. In corporate contexts, the HR approach has been dominant leading to a relative narrow conception of learning that does not fully address the complex and systemic learning challenges such as sustainability transitions.

Theoretically this study integrates Brandi and Iannone’s (2020) HR–WPL framework with a subject-centred sociocultural conception of professional agency (Eteläpelto et al., 2013). Subject-centered socio-cultural approach views professional agency first and foremost as individuals’ actions to influence and shape their work and learning, emerging from the dynamic interplay between personal goals, professional identity, and the social-cultural conditions of the workplace. This perspective emphasizes the nature of agency more as intentional actions and affecting matters rather than individual characteristics or dispositions (Hökkä et al., 2023; Goller & Paloniemi, 2022). This approach also highlight the importance of professional subjects and their identities as a crucial foundation for agentic actions. Professional identity is understood as a dynamic, multifaceted, and socially negotiated construction that integrates individuals’ values, commitments, competencies, and sense of professional self at work (Eteläpelto et al., 2013). Subject-centered sociocultural perspective aligns closely with the WPL tradition emphasised in Brandi and Iannone’s synthesis, as it conceptualises agency not as a stable individual trait but as intentional action emerging from the interplay between individuals’ identities, goals, and the socio-material conditions of work. At the same time, it enables an analysis of how organisational structures and HR-driven learning arrangements are experienced, interpreted, and acted upon by subjects in concrete work practices.

In this study we focus on the learning challenges that companies face in the transition towards the circular economy and on the role of top managers in leading learning within these transformations. Specifically, we examine top managers’ professional agency in leading learning at work. We ask how they understand learning in relation to sustainability transitions, how they perceive their professional agency in leading learning and innovation, and which structural, cultural, and systemic factors enable or constrain their agency.