Community-Building Teaching Practices with Young People Through Exploring Teacher Professionalism

The article aims to link discussions about young people’s failure to thrive with the understanding of teachers’ professional tasks. It begins with the premise that understanding and addressing issues related to young people’s well-being is connected to knowledge about young people’s everyday school life. Thus, the article criticises decontextualised and individualistic understanding of and approaches to unsuccessful thriving. We highlight the necessity of gaining more knowledge about how teachers develop professional action opportunities when young people experience well-being issues and participate at school from marginalised positions. The article offers and elaborates on the concept of ‘exploring teacher professionalism’ grounded in a social practice theoretical understanding of knowledge as distributed in practice and learning, development and well-being as connected to situated participation conditions. An empirical case serves as an illustrative example, both in criticising decontextualised understanding and approaches to failure to thrive and for the potential of developing contextual knowledge about conditions for participation in learning communities at school as a way of dealing with failure to thrive.