Abstract

The research focuses on the experience of nine Chilean beginner teachers staying in vulnerable schools. From an ecological approach of the teacher agency and a biographical narrative methodology, different dimensions are articulated in understanding the phenomenon. Four central themes are proposed, namely: life story: finding the source of sustenance and professional meaning; the link with students as the root of permanence; the composition of a school context as a protector and facilitator of teaching; and imagined futures in education: purposes and possibilities of projection. The findings allow progress towards an integrated and multidimensional understanding of permanence in schools and provide communicating threads between dimensions of teachers’ personal environments interwoven with the daily, relational, and systemic environments in which the profession unfolds.