Greek Cypriot primary school teachers’ narrations of “Erasmus” as a space of professional development: at the intersection of the personal and the professional

Abstract

This article focuses on the European Programme Erasmus for schools (KA110-SCH and KA220-SCH) as an instantiation of the broader project of creating a European Area of Education (EAE) to explore its enactment as narrated by primary school teachers in Cyprus. Although numerous different models of teachers’ professional development (PD) have been proposed in the literature, Erasmus seems to combine several aspects of those in a particular way. Moreover, how it is enacted during teachers’ lives has rarely been studied. Adopting a biographical approach, we were able to explore teachers’ PD during Erasmus at the intersection of their personal and professional lives, as well as of their local school contexts and broader institutional (national and European) contexts. This was made possible through life histories, which were compiled through a series of long interviews with eight Greek Cypriot primary school teachers with varied and multiple Erasmus experiences over the last 20 years. The interviews were thematically coded and analysed and so were the life histories; the cross-analysis of the latter allowed the tracing of numerous Erasmus experiences which formed three distinct spaces of PD: pedagogical, leadership-professional and personal-sociocultural. Across all three spaces, Erasmus was narrated as PD creating distinct personal and professional opportunities in constant interplay, despite placing demands on both the personal and professional realms throughout teachers’ lives; it was thus construed as going beyond merely typical forms of PD, but rather as infusing their lives with a long-term European dimension. Although demanding, this interplay seemed to sustain teachers’ pursuit of Erasmus. These findings are discussed in relation to debates about the Europeanisation of education, teacher governance and teacher professional development.