C.03. Reimagining the Teaching Profession: Well-being, Identity and Community in Transforming Educational Fields

This panel draws inspiration from the research and collaborative experience developed within the Erasmus+ project "Connecting Teachers – A Community of Practice to Promote Teachers' Well-being" (2025–2028). The project has created a unique space for comparative reflection and experimentation on teachers' well-being, identity, and professional development across different European contexts, during a time of widespread teacher shortages and burnout (OECD, 2025; UNESCO, 2024).

Building on this background, the panel examines how the teaching profession is being redefined in the face of accelerated social, digital, and institutional transformations. Teachers today inhabit a field marked by intensifying accountability, emotional demands, and structural uncertainty, yet also by new opportunities for collective reflection and professional community-building.

From a sociological and comparative perspective, the contributions will discuss how institutional conditions, symbolic representations, and everyday practices shape teachers' professional identities and well-being. The discussion reframes well-being not as a psychological or individual matter but as a relational and institutional phenomenon, co-produced within organisational cultures and communities of practice.

Finally, the panel invites reflection on how higher education and teacher training can foster the capacity for critical reflexivity, cooperation, and sustainable professional engagement, renewing the social and cultural foundations of teaching in Europe.