Teacher Well‐Being Across Educational Contexts in Türkiye: A Narrative‐Ecological Analysis of Workload, Accountability, and Recognition

ABSTRACT This narrative inquiry examines English teacher well‐being across three institutional contexts in Türkiye: private K‐12 schooling, state vocational education, and a university language unit. Drawing on life‐story conversations, follow‐up elicitation interviews, and participant‐selected anonymized artifacts, it explores well‐being in relation to workload, recognition, professional identity, and institutional expectations. Three teachers were purposefully selected to maximize ecological contrast. Barkhuizen's positioning analysis was integrated with Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory to examine how institutional demands enter teachers’ accounts of self, duty, voice, and professional possibility. Findings show that well‐being was shaped by individual resilience and by how institutions organized work, evaluated performance, and distributed recognition. Case patterns involved branding and visibility labor, care‐based moral strain, and non‐recognition of pedagogical labor. Across cases, teachers used selective compliance, quiet refusals, and context‐sensitive pedagogical workarounds to preserve professional values under misaligned institutional conditions. The study contributes a narrative‐ecological lens for tracing well‐being across nested educational ecologies.