Positioning novice teachers as truth-tellers: how novice teachers can engage in fearless speech and exercise their agency

What teachers do in their classrooms is underpinned by their personal and professional values: this is their teacher agency. Despite this, some suggest that novice teachers can struggle to teach in a way which reflects the values and beliefs which are important to them, hindering their teacher agency. This article is a hopeful one in that it argues that those at the start of their teaching careers can engage in small acts of resistance which can be identified as ‘truth-telling’. By engaging in fearless speech, the novice teachers in this small-scale qualitative study demonstrated an ability to do what it was they thought they should be doing, to exert and develop their sense of teacher agency, despite the potential for risks to their reputations or positions within their schools. The article concludes by advocating for more truth-telling, especially for those working within current Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England.