Changing Teacher Professionalism

International trends, challenges and ways forward

Sharon Gewirtz, Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall, Alan Cribb, Sharon Gewirtz, Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall, Alan Cribb

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134034123
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

Significant changes in the policy and social context of teaching over the last 30 years have had substantial implications for teacher professionalism. As the influence of central regulation and marketisation has increased, so the scope for professional influence on policy and practice has in many cases diminished. Instead, teachers have had to respond to a range of other demands stemming from broader social changes, including greater public scepticism towards professional authority combined with demands for public services that are more responsive to diverse cultural and social identities.

This collection of work by leading international scholars in the field makes a unique contribution to understanding both how these changes are impacting on teaching and how teachers might change their practice for the better. The central premise of the book is that if research is going to be helpful in improving professional learning and the quality of teachers' practice, the full potential of three broad approaches to research on teacher professionalism needs to be brought to bear on these issues:

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• research on the changing political and social context of professional work and practice

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• research on the working lives and lived experiences of teachers, and

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• research on how teachers' professional practices might be enhanced.

In bringing together and drawing out the complementarities of these three approaches, this book represents a ground-breaking collection of work.

1 Policy, professionalism and practice

Understanding and enhancing teachers’ work

Sharon Gewirtz, Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall and Alan Cribb

The aim of this collection is to make a contribution to understanding the changing nature of teacher professionalism. We seek to do this both as an end in itself and to inform debates about enhancing teachers’ professional practice. Much has been written about the notion of professionalism and related notions such as ‘profession’, ‘professionalization’ and ‘professionality’, and the literature is full of all manner of overlapping distinctions and debates. We will not attempt an overview of this literature here – which would in any case take up the whole of this introduction. Nor, given the extraordinary level of contestation that surrounds the topic, will we attempt a simple ‘definition’ of the concept of professionalism. Nonetheless, we will offer a brief account of the broad domain we are exploring before going on to map the policy shifts that are currently shaping teachers’ work and the rationale and structure of the book.

Professionalism

Professionalism is an idea that points in many different directions. At least two are worth signalling here – first, it points in the direction of ‘profession’, that is a category of occupational classification; and second, in the direction of ‘professional virtues’, that is categorizations of technical and ethical standards claimed on behalf of certain occupational roles. It is also possible, and commonplace, to see both ‘professions’ and ‘professional virtues’ in normative terms – treating them either more or less idealistically or, by contrast, more or less critically. Idealistic conceptions of professionalism emphasize the special nature of professional workers, in particular their specialist expertise, and the associated ethical virtues of trustworthiness, collegiality and service. Critical conceptions emphasize the exclusionary nature of professions and the self-interested ideologies that underpin and mask their claims to special status and influence over others.

We want to argue that in order to understand teacher professionalism we need to work with plural conceptions of professionalism that encompass all of these elements and that we need to do so dialectically. For example, we should not think of professionalism as either a genuine concern about standards and ethics and ‘doing one’s job well’ or as a legitimating discourse that reproduces particular forms of (classed, ‘raced’ and gendered) identity, power and in/exclusion, but as simultaneously both of these things. Similarly, we think it is important to keep both the ideas of ‘profession’ and ‘professionalism’ in play. We say this because for those of us who are interested in teacher professionalism it can be tempting to try and separate out these two ideas. Such a separation would seem to allow us to put aside the broader symbolic connotations of labelling teachers as professionals, along with questions about whether teaching is a profession or a semi-profession (or whether it is being deprofessionalized or reprofessionalized, etc). Instead we could simply concentrate on questions about what makes a good teacher and how teaching might be enhanced. However, this is by no means an easy separation to make. Freidson’s analysis of professionalism as ‘The Third Logic’ (2001) shows why these two sets of questions are closely interrelated and is one useful account of the glue that holds the complex and contested concept of professionalism together.

For Freidson, professions are occupational groupings that exercise relatively high degrees of control over the conditions and conduct of their work and this kind of arrangement provides a mechanism for organizing some aspects of social life in a way that properly deploys specialist knowledge. Thus professionalism, in this sense, is a mode of social coordination that competes with, and provides some insulation from, both market and bureaucratic forms of organization. Trust is a key component of the professional mode of coordination which entails a contract between professionals and the wider society – one in which professional groups provide expertise and standards and in return are trusted to do their job. To function in this way professionalism needs to be both a regime of control and an ideology – that is professional groups need a certain amount of social power and collective autonomy and need to show why professionals can and ought to be trusted. For teachers, in other words, a concern with ‘doing a good job’ cannot be separated out from a concern about individual and collective teacher autonomy and teacher power because ‘doing a good job’ involves being in a position to fully deploy one’s expertise and to shape what gets done.

Hence, in this collection we are necessarily interested in both idealistic and critical readings of professionalism and in professionalism in the two senses we have just outlined – both as a mode of social coordination and as shorthand for a (shifting and contested) set of occupational virtues.

Changing landscapes

Over the past thirty years there have been significant changes in the policy and social context of teaching that have had substantial implications for both of these senses of professionalism. Under the influence of neo-liberal ideologies and associated new managerial technologies – with their privileging of cost-containment, efficiency and productivity goals – this period has seen an increase in the central regulation of the work of teachers and an increased role for quasi-markets centred on the ideas of choice and competition. As the influence of these alternative modes of coordination has increased, so, in many national settings, the scope for professional influence on policy and practice has diminished. However, as well as facing demands that stem from state regulation and competition, teachers have also had to respond to other demands stemming from broader social changes. These include greater public scepticism towards professional authority combined with a culture of consumerism, demands for public services that are more responsive to diverse cultural and social identities, and transformations in information and communications technologies.

These shifts have, of course, taken on different forms and been experienced and responded to very differently by teachers working in different settings. For example, although the trends might be similar, teachers working in the ‘developing’ economies of South America or Africa are obviously faced with very different kinds of demands and challenges from those working in Australia, New Zealand, Europe or the US (Day and Sachs 2004) and the scope for teachers to influence policy and shape their own practice also varies from region to region and country to country. This is illustrated by Jones’ comparative study of the ‘remaking of education in Europe’, which has drawn attention to stark differences in the capacity for trade unions and other social movements to influence policy. Jones distinguishes between ‘societies – France, Italy – where [counter-hegemonic social or ideological] blocs exist in a form strong enough still to present major obstacles to neo-liberal policy, and other societies – Spain, Germany, England – in which … such blocs have been weaker or have been dispersed’ (Jones 2005: 231; see also, Stevenson 2007; Weis and Compton 2007).

Even within the apparently similar Nordic countries there is considerable diversity in the ways in which governments have approached the restructuring of their education systems (Hudson 2007) with diverse implications for teachers’ professional and personal identities and autonomy. For instance, in Norway the day-to-day working lives of teachers are tightly regulated by a prescriptive national curriculum, whereas in Sweden much softer forms of central regulation of teachers’ work are achieved via a ‘goal-oriented’ national curriculum. As a consequence, the individual autonomy that teachers have over their work is arguably much weaker in Norway than Sweden. Yet, according to Helgøy and Homme (2007), Norwegian teachers have ‘a relatively strong collective professional identity’ while Swedish teachers ‘rely on a more personalized type of professionalism emphasizing teachers’ knowledge, competence and performance as individual properties’ (Helgøy et al. 2007: 200).

Nevertheless, despite such differences, it is still undoubtedly the case that the recent ‘tectonic shift’ (Robertson 2007) in education policy discourse – with its apparently contradictory components of regulation and standardization on the one hand and devolution, diversity and individualism on the other – is effectively a global phenomenon. As the contributions to this book will demonstrate, this discursive shift and the complex and uneven transformations in teacher identities, roles and working lives that it has generated have significant implications for conceptions of – and the possibilities for – effective professional learning and professional practice.

Rationale and content

The premise of this book is that if research is going to be helpful in informing policy and in improving professional learning and professional practice, the full potential of three broad approaches to research on teacher professionalism needs to be brought together. With the exception of this opening chapter and the concluding chapter by Ian Menter, the book is divided into three parts, broadly reflecting these three approaches. The first approach, which draws on combinations of historical, critical policy, sociological and philosophical analysis, is concerned to examine the changing political and social context of public-sector professional work. The second, largely sociological, approach is concerned to understand changes in the working lives and experiences – and roles and identities – of teachers. The third approach is concerned to explore how teachers’ professional practices might be enhanced. This approach draws on and combines a wide range of disciplines and research methods. These include intervention studies, involving experimentation with different approaches to teacher development, and philosophical and critical analysis of the qualities that make up good teaching and the political and organizational conditions that are most conducive to enhancing teachers’ practice.

While each approach foregrounds a different substantive concern, it is clear – not least from the contributions to this collection – that in practice all three approaches overlap and interrelate. Any analysis of the policy context of teaching and learning is inevitably going to be informed by an interest in the practices that take place within, are shaped by and shape that context; in order to understand the working lives and identities of teachers we need to pay attention to the climates within which those lives are lived and out of which those identities are constructed; and, finally, anyone interested in enhancing professional learning needs to attend to the policies, and the teacher identities and subjectivities, which can make enhanced professional learning and practice possible or constrain its realization. We hope that by bringing these three approaches together in one volume we will help to deepen understandings both of the connections between them and of the policies, working conditions and conceptions of effective professional learning and practice that are most likely to enhance the quality of teachers’ lives and work.

Part 1

The four chapters in Part 1 illustrate the first of these approaches and focus on the changing context of professionalism. Those working in this tradition are concerned to map and analyse the transformations in the policy, ethical and social landscapes of professional work. This includes historical and sociological analysis of discourses of professionalism; philosophical analysis of the shifting ethical terrain within which professionals operate; and historical and contemporary accounts of the changing relationships among the state, public-sector organizations, the professionals who work in them and the people who use them.

Highly prescriptive initiatives such as the national literacy and numeracy strategies in England and mandated instructional routines in the US have arguably positioned teachers, ‘as recipe-following operatives whose role is to “deliver”’ (Winch and Foreman-Peck 2005:2). However, as a number of the contributions to this book indicate, there has not been a complete erosion of autonomy. Rather, it appears to be that autonomy is increasingly only allowed to be exercised within tight limits that are determined by what policymakers believe to be in the interests of narrowly defined notions of educational success. In Chapter 2, Julia Evetts provides a language of description that can help us to make sense of this reconfiguration of teacher autonomy. In particular she distinguishes between two ideal-types – organizational professionalism (or professionalism ‘from above’) and occupational professionalism (or professionalism ‘from within’). Evetts characterizes organizational professionalism as involving:

the increased standardization of work procedures and practices and managerialist controls. It relies on externalized forms of regulation and accountability measures such as target-setting and performance review.

(Evetts, this volume)

By contrast, occupational professionalism:

incorporates collegial authority…. It is based on autonomy and discretionary judgement and assessment by practitioners in complex cases. … Controls are operationalized by practitioners themselves who are guided by codes of professional ethics which are monitored by professional institutes and associations.

(Evetts, this volume)

It would be too simplistic to suggest that what we are seeing is a wholesale shift from occupational to organizational professionalism because in reality the two kinds of professionalism are more likely to coexist (as will become evident from some of the contributions to Part 2). Nevertheless, Evetts’ account helps us to see how the balance between the two conceptions might be shifting as neo-liberal approaches to educational governance increasingly take hold.

As noted above, increased central control of educational systems has been accompanied by an increased role for markets in education. This has led to concerns about the penetration of ‘accounting logic’ (Broadbent and Loughlin 1997) into educational processes. In Chapter 3, Alan Cribb considers what this means for the ethical climate of teaching. He argues that the result is a greater focus on narrower, extrinsic conceptions of ‘success’ as captured in institutional performance indicators and a diminution in the attention paid to ‘more open-ended, “thicker”, contested and intrinsic modes of determining’ what really counts in education. However, Cribb also argues that teachers are not passive in processes of ‘ethical drift’. They are active ethical agents who continually have to negotiate the dilemma-laden terrain of contemporary educational practice, and somehow reconcile conflicting ethical commitments. Cribb’s analysis invites professionals to question whether, when and why ‘doing my job’ is the same as ‘doing the right thing’.

Sitting alongside, and feeding into, centralizing and marketizing policies are social changes that have important implications for the work of teachers. Of particular relevance to teachers’ work are ‘multiple anti-statist and anti-professional tendencies’ (Newman and Clarke 2005: 2) the implications of which are discussed by John Clarke and Janet Newman in Chapter 4. These tendencies are associated with a range of user and social movements around welfare (and education) policies and practices; forms of ‘“demotic” populism that have made the “voice of ordinary people” more valued’; and the rise of a culture of consumerism, reflected in various forms of ‘conspicuous’ and ‘ethical’ consumption (Newman and Clarke 2005: 2). Such tendencies have informed policies of marketization – which were designed to challenge ‘producer capture’ and rebalance the education and welfare systems in favour of consumers or users – but they also act as independent forces in their own right that teachers cannot ignore. In short, as Clarke and Newman put it, these tendencies mean that:

people no longer believe – or are willing to accede to – the proposition that ‘professionals know best’. In the process both the situational and wider social authority enjoyed by professionals (even public service professionals) has become fragile or contingent.

(Clarke and Newman, this volume)

This change has implications for how professionals relate to their publics and, in the specific case of education, how teachers relate to parents and students. As Clarke and Newman point out, responding to ‘consumers’ is a complex task involving an appreciation of the unequal distribution – by class, age, ethnicity and biography – of assertiveness, knowledge and the capacity to articulate demands and interests. Responding to consumers also involves an appreciation of the fact that individual consumers are not stable, unitary entities. The same parent, for example, may be knowledgeable and assertive about some aspect of their child’s educational needs but dependent on professional guidance about other aspects. Hence Clarke and Newman talk about ‘unstable encounters’ between professionals and their publics ‘in which the possibilities of getting it wrong have multiplied as both the public and service organizations try to manage each other in more uncertain times’.

Ken Jones concludes Part 1 by reminding us in Chapter 5 that policy is modulated by local circumstance, and takes different forms in different places. To illustrate this argument he considers t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Policy, professionalism and practice: understanding and enhancing teachers’ work
• PART 1 The changing context of professionalism
• 2 The management of professionalism: a contemporary paradox
• 3 Professional ethics: whose responsibility?
• 4 Elusive publics: knowledge, power and public service reform
• 5 An English vernacular: teacher trade unionism and educational politics 1970–2007
• PART 2 Living professionalism
• 6 Paradoxes of teaching in neo-liberal times: education ‘reform’ in Chicago
• 7 Pedagogizing teacher professional identities
• 8 The lived experiences of black professionals in UK schools: Pioneers, Settlers and Inheritors
• 9 Inventing the Chartered Teacher
• 10 On the making and taking of professionalism in the further education workplace
• 11 In the shadow of the Research Assessment Exercise? Working in a ‘new’ university
• PART 3 Enhancing professionalism
• 12 Making teacher change happen
• 13 Improving schoolteachers’ workplace learning
• 14 Research-based teaching
• 15 Values and ideals in teachers’ professional judgement
• 16 Education and the public good: the integrity of academic practice
• 17 Leadership for professional practice
• CONCLUSION
• 18 Teachers for the future: what have we got and what do we need?