Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practice

Teaching with a professional compass

Clare Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138025912
• eBook ISBN: 9781317685432
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practice focuses on a key, but neglected, element of a teacher's identity: that of their subject expertise. Studies of teachers' professional practice have shown the importance of a teacher's identity and the extent to which it can affect their resilience, commitment and ultimately their effectiveness.

Drawing upon narrative research undertaken with a range of teachers over a period of 14 years, the book explores how subject expertise can play a significant role in teacher identity, acting as a professional compass guiding teachers at all levels of their professional practice. It reveals powerful individual stories of meaning-making which highlight the dynamic importance of teachers' subject expertise

The book's metaphor of a professional compass goes to the heart of teacher professionalism, and provides a valuable mechanism to enable teachers to respond to challenges they face in their daily practice. It enables teachers to consider the moral dimensions of their practice, and can constitute a significant component in professional formation and identity. Throughout the book the importance of subject expertise for teachers' professional practice is explored at a range of scales: from the classroom to broad education policy, and at different stages of a teacher's career which offers readers a deeper understanding of the importance of subject expertise for teachers.

Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practice makes a significant contribution to an under-researched area. It identifies the role and significance of teachers' subject expertise as a dimension of their teacher identity. The book is key reading for teacher educators, policy makers and researchers with an interest in teachers' professional development and practice.

1

BEING A TEACHER IN THIS DAY AND AGE

Steven had always wanted to be a geography teacher. It was the reason he studied geography at school, and at university. On his degree course, Steven was one of the few people who were clear about what they wanted to do after graduation. His focus on becoming a geography teacher influenced the module choices he made at university: unlike many of his friends, he chose not to specialize in physical or human geography, but to maintain a balance between both.

Having no particular specialism was deliberate, to gain a balance, but additionally because my genuine interest was evident in all chosen areas of focus . . . I feel Geography is a wonderful vehicle to explore not only processes, features, concepts and events but also additionally people’s values and attitudes.

Steven wanted to build his knowledge in all areas of the discipline, even if it meant studying aspects of geography he found less engaging. For Steven, balance was what made geography distinctive from other disciplines. Too much emphasis on one side or the other, he felt was ‘out of balance’, and could prevent people from making informed decisions.

I worked for a mining company in Scotland which, from a teaching point of view, was an interesting context because you got to see why people think what they do – getting to see the other side of the argument. It’s far too easy to give the view of the conservationists: the environmentalists’ viewpoint. It’s quite an easy one that kids empathize with, but I think it needs to be a balanced argument and having that experience has exposed me to that.

After teaching geography for ten years, balance continued to be important to Steven, influencing how he viewed his students.

One of the things that I believe in as a teacher and not just as a geography teacher is that a kid comes into the classroom with a lot of baggage and you can’t just teach that person as a separate entity without the baggage – you’ve got to take into consideration the baggage.

Steven thought that geography would be useful to his students because it would enable them to function in many aspects of their lives.

I would hope that they would leave having enjoyed the subject, even if it’s not their passion, appreciating that it can be someone else’s passion. I would hope that they would leave with a desire to still find out more, with an ability to find out how something else works, or to appreciate why people reacted in a certain way to an event, to appreciate the fact that an issue isn’t purely black and white, that there are several issues to the story. There are several reasons for why things can happen and I would hope that they would try to offer an explanation to an awful lot of things that crop up. If they have a passion for geography or to find out more about it, that’s the ultimate job.

Fifteen years later, Steven was no longer teaching geography. He had moved to Scotland, and was working in a school as a support teacher. He decided to move to Scotland when his last public examination class came to the end of their studies, and he decided that he had had enough of teaching in England. He described how the changes that were happening in his school had been having an impact on his practice: the increasing pressures of accountability were taking him away from doing what he considered to be a ‘good job’. Steven decided to move to Scotland where he could be the sort of teacher he wanted to be, even if that meant losing some of what he described as the ‘professional status’ he had built up.

Steven’s story is not unusual. There is a teaching recruitment and retention crisis, particularly in England where four out of ten teachers leave the profession within their first year (The Telegraph 2015). In the US, many teachers are approaching retirement age and there are not enough new entrants to the profession to fill the gap. The OECD report (2005) on the international picture of teacher recruitment and retention offers the following summary:

Although the information is often patchy a broad picture of concerns across countries has emerged about:

• ‘qualitative’ shortfalls: whether enough teachers have the knowledge and skills to meet school needs;

• limited connections between teacher education, teachers’ professional development, and school needs;

• maintaining an adequate supply of good quality teachers, especially in high demand subject areas;

• the image and status of teaching: teachers often feel that their work is undervalued;

• long term trends in the composition of the teaching workforce, e.g. fewer ‘high achievers’ and males;

• sometimes high rates of teacher attrition, especially among new teachers;

• the impact of high workloads, stress and poor working environments on job satisfaction and teaching effectiveness;

• limited means in most countries to recognise and reward teachers’ work;

• in some countries, a large over-supply of qualified teachers, which raises its own policy challenges;

• inequitable distribution of teachers among schools, and concerns over whether students in disadvantaged areas have the quality teachers that they need.

(OECD 2005: 5)

As the report highlights, one area of concern is the changing nature of teaching and the effect it can have on teacher effectiveness. For example, the National Union of Teachers (Galton and MacBeath 2008) highlights the ‘intensification’ of teachers’ work across England (as well as in Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia), stating: ‘“Intensification” is a prevailing concern, leaving many teachers with the feeling that time-consuming initiatives are designed to control performance rather than benefit pupils’ educational development’ (Galton and MacBeath 2008: 2). The report relates these findings to the high incidence of teacher burnout and concludes that managerial workforce remodelling style reforms fail to get to the heart of teachers’ concerns.

The deprofessionalizing effect of accountability reforms has been widely recognized (see Whitty 2008). Research into the impact of the Standards Agenda in England (Day 2004) emphasizes how education policy can affect the work of individual schools, which ultimately presents dilemmas for individual teachers. Day (2012) outlines how much of the research into the impact of these reforms has taken a rather negative view of the effect they can have on teachers, and has neglected to explore the experiences of teachers who have flourished and who continue to work effectively within the same reform context. This is echoed in the call for teachers to be more resilient in their work (see Sammons et al. 2007).

Indeed, the idea that teachers should be more resilient in the light of education reforms has led some to question the nature of teacher recruitment. The OECD (2005) has acknowledged that the recruitment of quality teachers is a concern for both high performing and developing economies. The concern is to ensure that appropriately qualified teachers are recruited who have the qualities that will enable them to stay in the profession long term. But these concerns are focused on teachers themselves rather than the rapidly changing contexts that teachers find themselves in. In turn, these changing contexts show remarkable similarities around the globe (Ball 2012). Day and Gu (2010) suggest that these reforms share similar characteristics. They:

• are happening because governments believe that by intervening to change the conditions under which students learn, they can accelerate improvements, raise standards of achievement and somehow increase economic competitiveness;

• address implicit worries of governments concerning a perceived fragmentation of personal and social values in society;

• result in an increased workload for teachers;

• do not pay attention to teachers’ identities – arguably central to motivation, efficacy, commitment, job satisfaction and wellbeing;

• emanate from a deficit view of teachers; and

• do not acknowledge the importance of teacher wellbeing and commitment.

(Day and Gu 2010: 25)

Day and Gu call for a refocus on teacher identity as a response to the pressures of reform, arguing that it is key to understanding teacher effectiveness.

Teacher identity is indeed central to understanding how teachers adapt to reform. Whilst leaving teaching might seem out-of-step for someone like Steven who had always wanted to be a teacher, working in a support capacity is entirely in line with what he values − balance. Balance is one of the factors which drew him to teaching geography in the first place and it continues as a major theme in his professional life. A desire to achieve balance in his own life is reflected in his reasons for moving to a rural part of Scotland, in his personal interest in the environment and environmental stewardship, in his concern that schools look after their students, and in his views on what young people should be learning in schools.

In my discussions with Steven, he traced where this emphasis on balance had come from and why it was so important to him. It began at school when he felt drawn to school geography as the only subject which helped him to understand and explain both the natural and the social forces that shape the world. It went on to influence his university module choices, and it has informed his practice as a geography teacher. Steven describes how balance is needed to understand the world and to function effectively within it. For him, balance is a word that is profoundly geographical, as it reflects the disciplinary concerns of both physical and human geography, and how they come together to make up the unified discipline (see Matthews and Herbert 2004). For him, the idea of balance is also moral as it mediates against extremism and represents fairness.

Steven’s story, which was told to me over a period of 15 years, is remarkable for its consistency and coherence. This suggests that these values are a sustaining feature of his professional practice, and can be seen as an aspect of his identity. What is interesting to note is that the idea stems from the subject he teaches. For Stephen, balance is a geographical idea which appears to act like a professional compass, guiding his professional practice. He uses this compass to navigate the professional landscapes he has found himself in.

Professional knowledge landscapes

To understand Steven’s story, and in particular why he chose to move away from teaching geography, it is useful to consider the contexts of his professional practice or, in other words, his professional knowledge landscapes.

The idea that teachers work within a professional knowledge landscape was first introduced by Clandinin and Connelly (1995). They describe these landscapes as being made up of ‘sacred stories’ which come from official discourses, and which may be in conflict with teachers’ own stories of their professional practice. Clandinin and Connelly argue that this creates dilemmas which are knowledge dilemmas as they represent a conflict between official knowledge, as represented by policies or directives from their school or official discourses, and the personal knowledge of the teacher. In this book I want to go a stage further and suggest that these landscapes can play a profound role in affecting how teachers work and can, in effect, ‘make teachers up’, in that they can influence not just what teachers do but also who they are.

One of the ways that teachers can respond to such sacred stories is to draw upon dimensions of their professional identity which reflect their values about education and teaching. The argument that I am presenting here is that these values can be traced back to a teacher’s subject identity. In other words, teacher subject identity can be an important driver in how teachers respond to reforms in education.

Whilst the narratives Clandinin and Connelly describe are vivid accounts, their focus is on localized and individual experiences of education contexts. More recent work has highlighted the pervasiveness of neoliberal education policies on how schools operate (Ball, Maguire and Braun 2012) and on individual teachers’ work (Day et al. 2007). What is missing from all these accounts is what qualities teachers need to operate effectively in these contexts and how they can develop these qualities.

The importance of teacher identity

Stories like Steven’s are important. Large scale surveys like the VITAE project reveal general patterns and trends in teachers’ working lives (Day et al. 2007; Sammons et al. 2007; Day and Gu 2010). However, to make full use of their findings, we need to understand more about how teachers make sense of their working lives. The VITAE project set out to explore the impact of the Standards Agenda on teachers in England. The report makes two valuable and important assertions: that teachers’ commitment can have a positive impact on students’ attainment and that effective teachers require resilience in order to sustain that commitment. The research focuses specifically on teachers’ professional and personal lives and charts the complexity of how motivation and commitment can ebb and flow through the duration of a career. However, the research does not pin down where teacher identity or commitment come from. It leaves unanswered the questions:

• Why are some teachers more committed than others?

• What influences teachers’ resilience?

• What can we do to promote these qualities in future teachers?

Whilst the research that underpins this book did not set out to answer these questions, the findings, narratives and stories that I present here throw some light on these issues. In talking to teachers over a period of some years (varying between four and fifteen) about their personal and professional lives, significant themes are evident about teacher identity and how identity relates to professional practice. Conducting this research over time can also reveal how changes in contexts can influence and affect these identities. Teacher identity is not static but can change and can be context sensitive. To understand teachers we need to understand the contexts they work in.

Clandinin and Connelly (1995) are right to acknowledge that professional knowledge landscapes have both a knowledge and a moral dimension. But research in this area has yet to explore the school subject and academic disciplinary contribution to the professional knowledge landscape. Indeed, the recent research on neoliberal education policies and their impact on schools (Maguire et al. 2011; Kaniuka 2012; Hatch 2013) presents a challenge to subject-based expertise. These policies can, on one hand, focus on the importance of (subject) knowledge as the basis for teachers’ authority, but on the other represent the teaching profession as one predicated on technical skill and lacking any specific knowledge-based component. Teachers can be left wondering what role their subject knowledge can play in their professional practice.

The implicit values and beliefs expressed in the professional knowledge landscape communicate clear expectations about practice. The official or sacred stories can influence the work of teachers, and can be observed at the level of classroom practice (as outlined by Clandinin and Connelly 1995), and at the level of the school (note the title of Ball, Maguire and Braun’s 2012 book How Schools Do Policy). These stories can exhibit both values and beliefs and also expectations about practice. To behave in a way that is counter to these stories can be extremely challenging for teachers. These challenges can be revealed in the narratives or stories that teachers tell about their work. By understanding these contexts in this way, we can deepen our understanding of how and why some teachers appear to flourish in some contexts that others find dysfunctional and why some teachers leave the profession and some teachers stay (as explored in Chapter Two).

Professional practice

The aim of the research discussed in this book is to understand the importance of teacher subject identity. The focus is on the experience of individual teachers and how they make sense of their work, and in particular how this sense-making can influence their practice.

The research takes a broad view of teachers’ professional practice. The classroom is the main site of teachers’ work, and is the key location for their interactions with students and colleagues. But professional practice can also recognize that some of teachers’ work takes place outside the classroom. The view of activist professionalism as outlined by Sachs (2003) recogn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practice
• Foundations and Futures of Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Being a Teacher in this Day and Age
• PART I Knowledge Landscapes and Teacher Identity
• PART II Narratives of Professional Practice
• Bibliography
• Index