A Look at MAD Teachers: Conscious Precariousness and Willingness to Teach

In recent years, challenges in teacher recruitment have increasingly been addressed using extraordinary hiring mechanisms, which have led to significant instability in this occupational sector. Among these alternative mechanisms, in Italy, we find the Messa A Disposizione – commonly referred to as MAD –, a recruitment channel provided by the legislator as a flexible solution to meet the demand for teachers. Despite the extensive use of MAD by schools, yet there is limited knowledge about the characteristics of the thousands of individuals working in the school system through this contract. Our research contributes to the broader field of Sociology of Education by shedding light on how flexible recruitment mechanisms, such as MAD, influence teacher precarity and the overall stability of the school system. We focus on this subpopulation of temporary teachers, outlining their main characteristics and investigating these teachers’ motivations to teach and long-term related perspectives, through an online questionnaire, filled by over four hundred MAD teachers. The sociodemographic profile of the sample can be summarized by one general term: heterogeneity. For most respondents, MAD is not an instrumental and planned choice to temporally teach while developing another career; at the opposite, most of them are oriented toward a permanent integration in the school system, considering MAD a teaching experience, while completing their professional development in this direction. Future lines of investigation and policy implications are discussed.