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The fragmentation of academic work and its uneven distribution among academic staff have produced particular challenges for new entrants to teaching in Higher Education, Early Career Teachers [ECTs]. In this paper, documentary analysis of the narratives of fourteen ECTs, who worked across six different continents, was undertaken. The findings highlight the diverse forms of precarity that ECTs face, which cut across migratory, identitarian, economic, and ideological dimensions. It discusses ECTs' reflections on their expectations of teaching and their adaptation to the demands of neoliberal Higher Education. Drawing from their narratives and Sevil Sümer's theories of differentiated academic citizenship, ECTs are recognised as 'precarious academic citizens'. This has important implications for revealing the unique circumstances of this group, thereby opening further questions as regards their mentoring and support to enable them to be situated more equally as citizens of the academy.

As a central objective, problem-solving skills are important in the mathematics curricula of many countries. However, such skills tend to receive limited and rarely systematic attention in mathematics lessons, including in the Netherlands. To address this gap, the authors adopt a specific approach that defines problem solving as integral to mathematics: Teaching mathematics Through Problem solving (TTP). In Japan, teachers often learn about TTP by performing Lesson Study (LS), an approach in which teachers work in teams to design and conduct a research lesson that allows them to learn collectively about students' learning processes. TTP offers a promising, structured, didactical approach to introducing problem solving in mathematics lessons, and LS appears to represent an effective means for teachers to learn about TTP. To test this proposition, the current study entails a TTP- and LS-based intervention implemented in two secondary schools in the Netherlands, with an explicit focus on problem-solving skills. The central research objective for this study is to determine whether this TTP-LS-intervention helps mathematics teachers incorporate problem-solving skills into their lessons and how design characteristics and mechanisms of the intervention affect the outcomes. Interviews with teachers provide insights into which characteristics of the TTP-LS intervention fostered the implementation of problem solving in their teaching practice, as well as which did not. The collected data show that the teachers regard TTP as a valuable pedagogy to teaching mathematical problem solving. They report that the joint development, implementation, and evaluation of TTP lessons in the LS cycles, and especially observations of students, has given them more tools for applying TTP pedagogy and that they use these tools to promote problem-solving skills. Elements of the TTP lessons that the teachers perceived as difficult were the lesson phases that featured discussions on solution strategies rather than finding the "right" answers. Teachers regarded LS as a suitable approach for learning about TTP. Some points for improvement also emerged from the data. For example, more support should be given to TTP-LS-teams to explain the problem-solving skills they want to target in their lessons, and to practice especially the classroom discussion and summary phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]