The <i>Playing</i> Teacher project: A card game to encourage dialogue about professional identity with early career teachers

The Playing Teacher project is a playful ‐ yet serious ‐ response to the teacher supply crisis currently experienced by schools in England. The project seeks to develop a set of cards which can be used by those supporting new teachers to open up spaces to talk about ‘becoming a teacher’. In doing so, the project aims to create dialogic spaces where dominant cultural and political images of the teacher can be challenged and, if necessary, resisted. In this article, I argue that providing such dialogic spaces is important for the mental well-being of teachers, whose expectations when entering the profession are often at odds with the reality of becoming a teacher within the current neoliberal, performative education environment.