Abstract

• The aim of this study is to explore the beginning teachers’ perceptions on teacher professionalism in seven selected townships in Mandalay Region. The questionnaire survey was constructed based on the models of Dr. Kornhauser (1962), Hall (1968), Hargreaves and Goodson (1996), Tichenor and Tichenor (2009), and the OECD (2016). It included 68 items, which had five subscales: subject and pedagogical knowledge, commitment, autonomy, ethics, relationships, and work responsibilities beyond the classroom. A four-point Likert scale was used in this study. Although the questionnaires were distributed to 423 beginning teachers from the selected townships, the responses of 407 beginning teachers were collected for the study. After collecting the data, descriptive statistics, an independent samples t-test, one way ANOVA, and post-hoc multiple comparison tests were calculated to analyze the data. The findings showed that the beginning teachers’ perceptions on teacher professionalism were high. It was found that there was a significant difference in perceptions of beginning teachers in the dimension of autonomy according to their gender and in the dimension of subject and pedagogical knowledge according to their teaching subjects. However, no significant differences were found in beginning teachers’ perceptions on teacher professionalism according to their age, position, academic qualification, and professional training. The information gained from the responses to three open-ended questions was complementary to the quantitative findings.