This is a grounded theory study of school as a social system in an atypical context. It was the aim of this study to develope context-specific theoretical propositions to understand how a school as a social system looks like in an atypical context, which is characterized by ethnic group, migrated groups of low socio-economic status and low-level education. A public school that shows these characteristics was chosen for the study. The school is mostly populated by students coming from Roman community and migrated families from northern and eastern part of Turkey. Data for the study came from different sources, including unstructured observations, one-to-one interviews with school principal and nine teachers, a focus group interview with nine parents and analysis of different types of documents. Data collection and analysis went hand in hand for the study. The study produced five theoretical propositions that were found to connect to a major process, which was called &ldquo / breaking vicious cycle&rdquo / by the researcher. These propositions generally suggest that there is a kind of vicious cycle in the functioning of a school in atypical contex that needs to be broken through making some collective changes in the daily life of school. For these changes to create a transformation in the school, it was suggested that the concept of education and the concept of school, as well as, teachers and principals&rsquo / role definitions should be redefined in the light of radical and critical educational views.

The present study aimed to investigate elementary school teachers&rsquo / motives to pursue a teaching career. Teachers&rsquo / motives to follow a teaching career were analyzed in terms of their gender, year of experience, graduate higher education institution, graduate high school, subject, and the presence or absence of other teachers in their families. The participants were 905 teachers from 38 public elementary schools in six central districts of Ankara. A forty-three-item, five point Likert scale questionnaire, developed by the researcher, was used for data collection. SPSS was utilized for the descriptive statistical analyses. Responses to open-ended question were qualitatively analyzed. The results of the study revealed that elementary school teachers agreed on mostly intrinsic and altruistic motives as their reasons to enter teaching. A liking for children, a desire to make a contribution to their development, and a wish for setting good models for them were among the motives teachers mostly agreed on. However, elementary school teachers mostly disagreed on extrinsic motives and miscellaneous reasons. Of the extrinsic motives the motives with the lowest mean scores were the one suggesting the financial advantages of teaching. Lastly, of the miscellaneous reasons teachers mostly disagreed they entered teaching because they did not know what else to do or they had no other choice. In other words, teachers disagreed they entered teaching because of an obligation or lack of opportunities. In conclusion, the results of this study can contribute to fill the gap in the literature on teachers&rsquo / motives to pursue a teaching career.