Evidence of Strategic Information Literacy Practices in Early Career Teachers' Navigation of TeachersPayTeachers

Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) has emerged as the most popular online educational marketplace of the moment, but exactly how curriculum marketplaces support professional learning and classroom curriculum design is still an emerging area of inquiry in educational research. This paper explores the perspectives of six novice teachers on the supplemental teaching materials available on TPT. Through semi-structured think-aloud interviews, we identified tensions related to teachers’ landscapes of practice, institutional mistrust, perceived authoritativeness of TPT sellers, curriculum marketplaces as altruistic platforms, and the affordances and constraints of TPT for managing finite resources. Findings suggest that professionals who work with preservice and in-service teachers must reframe their discussion of curriculum marketplaces toward developing early-career teachers’ critical curriculum cultivation practices. Such reframing has the potential to influence how educators make use of online curriculum marketplaces, what resources they download, and how those resources are employed.