As beginner teachers (BTs) transition from pre-service training to full-time teaching, they require support from their seniors to adjust well in their roles. However, the dominant discourse in literature portrays their senior teacher colleagues as rescuers while BTs are positioned—and sometimes position themselves—as helpless professionals to whom professional support is provided and they are passive recipients without initiation or agency. As a result, this study challenges this deficit approach and positions them as professionals who possess agency and are capable of transcending structural impediments that they encounter in their daily professional lives. This is necessitated by the South African reality where existing BT support structures are ad-hoc and informal.

However, research on how BTs use their resourcefulness and thus enact their agency to support themselves when confronted by structural constraints in their schools is sparse. Thus, this qualitative study explores how five BTs from South Africa used their agency to cope with some of the professional challenges they faced since joining the teaching profession as full-time employees. This paper is guided by one question: how do BTs use their agency to confront their experienced structural constraints?

To answer this question, we used interpretivism as a research paradigm. Purposive sampling was used to choose the participants in three selected public secondary schools in the Free State province. Data were collected through semi-structured individual interviews. Using Archer’s concepts of structure and agency as a lens, we found that BTs struggled with multiple structural disablements such as inadequate access to instructional materials and used their agency in varying degrees to cope with these challenges. Against this backdrop, the study recommends a bottom-up approach where BTs use their available network resources to support each other, instead of waiting to be rescued by their seniors. Secondly, it recommends cross-generational teacher forums that promote collaboration among teacher colleagues.

Keywords: Beginner teachers, mentoring, structure and agency, enablement and disablement.