The Life and Work of Teachers

International Perspectives in Changing Times

Christopher Day, Alicia Fernandez, Trond E. Hauge, Jorunn Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135700928
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Contributors from around the world tackle the factors that have the greatest impact on creating quality learning opportunities for students: namely policy, school leadership and teaching/teachers' lives. Drawing on a range of critical conceptual and empirical perspectives, the contributions illustrate the extent to which experience can be similar around the world. The book sheds much-needed light on the effects of mandated change upon school leaders and teachers, both nationally and internationally. It also demonstrates how teachers have coped or flourished, both because and in spite of the changing circumstances they work under.

Part I
Teacher Professionalism and Conditions of Change

1
Professional Knowledge and the Teacher’s Life and Work

Ivor Goodson

In this chapter Ivor Goodson claims that the kind of research knowledge we generate about teachers and for teachers is crucial in order to understand and define what sort of professionals teachers are and might become. He argues against conceptualizations of the teacher as researcher which focus upon pedagogical practice only, arguing instead that the parameters of practice cover a very wide terrain which extends beyond the classroom. Research, then, should focus more broadly on the teacher’s life and work. A range of strategies are identified and discussed. Goodson argues that focusing on teachers’ voices will provide a valuable range of insights into the new restructuring and reform processes in education, and into new policy concerns and directives.

This chapter begins with a short introduction detailing some of my views about the way global developments in this field are progressing. I have two suspicions, possible interpretations, about emergent patterns. First, the arguments of Alan Wolfe (1996) carry considerable weight with me. Wolfe has argued that what we are seeing globally is an attack on what he calls the ‘median level’. By this he means the public institutions: schools, universities, public broadcasting, libraries, hospitals and so on. In most countries, these institutions are coming under attack; this is evidenced by the fact that less and less is being spent on them. Lest we accept that it is a problem of shortage of money, it is worth pointing out that the opposite is happening to the police, the army and expenditure on military weapons and private developments like private shopping malls and private housing. Here there is a huge growth in expenditure and in expanding developments. Overall then, we are obviously not short of money. What is happening is that we are consistently choosing the private over the public at nearly all levels and this is playing through into an attack on the ‘median level’.
Wolfe argues that the median levels of professional life are a confusing nuisance between the direct relationship of the state and its subjects and industry and its customers. In the median-level critique, social criticism, theory building and arguments against inequality still reside. The attempt, therefore, at the global level, is to weaken this level and move the centre of action for knowledge construction to other levels. Michael Gibbons et al. (1994) have recently written about the distinction between mode 1 and mode 2 knowledge. Mode 1 knowledge is essentially disciplinary knowledge, normally developed in the traditional universities. Mode 2 knowledge is applied knowledge, increasingly developed in the R & D sectors of the private industrial base, together with the think tanks associated with this sector of the economy. Whilst mode 1 knowledge is under sustained attack, mode 2 knowledge is being sponsored. This is merely a version of the changing priority from the public to the private that I mentioned earlier.

A second line of inquiry concerns how we would test if some of these dark suspicions that I have detailed are in any way true. Well, one way is to look at workplace knowledge. Again, there is increasing evidence that the knowledge that workers and professionals are being given in training is, in spite of globalization, less and less general and theoretical and more and more context-specific, local and utilitarian.

Now, of course we can all think of examples that do not fit this pattern, but in terms of the teaching profession, how would we test this hypothesis? It would mean we would be looking for evidence that teachers are being turned from intellectual workers who control their own curriculum and pedagogy into technicians who define the curriculum designed by other people. They are less and less planners of their own destiny and more and more deliverers of prescriptions written by others.

So that is my long introduction of suspicions—to let you know where I stand. For it is at this point in the chapter that a discussion of the research about teachers and the kind of way we research teachers comes into the frame. My central point is that the way we study teachers reflects the value we put on them. It confirms what sort of people we think teachers are and should be. Crucially, the kind of research knowledge we generate helps in defining what sort of professionals teachers are and whether there is any real teacher professionalism at all, since the kind of knowledge base that is generated feeds back into the kind of professionalism which is legitimized. In short, the sort of research we do about teachers and on the teacher’s life and work is one of the areas of struggle in which the whole range of issues I have detailed about professionalism and policy are decided. So in asking what sort of knowledge is generated about teachers and for teachers, I want briefly to review the place of the teacher in research literature.

The Teacher’s Life and Work

Dan Lortie summarized the relationship between teachers and educational research studies in the United States in his book Schoolteacher (1975):

Schooling is long on prescription, short on description. That is nowhere more evident than in the case of the two million persons who teach in the public schools. It is widely conceded that the core transactions of formal education take place where teachers and students meet…. But although books and articles instructing teachers on how they should behave are legion, empirical studies of teaching work—and the outlook of those who staff the schools—remain rare.

(Lortie 1975:vii)

The general point that Lortie makes with regard to knowledge/power has been a continuing one in the research discourse as related to teachers: a good deal of prescription and implicit portrayal but very little serious study of, or collaboration with, those prescribed to or portrayed. Yet whilst there is continuity, there are also changes over time which exist at the intersection with social, political and economic history.

Introducing the book Teachers’ Lives and Careers, Ball and I (writing in 1985) argued that British research on teachers had moved through a number of contemporary phases. ‘In the 1960s teachers were shadowy figures on the educational landscape mainly known or unknown through large-scale surveys or historical analysis of their position in society; the key concept in approaching the practice of teaching was that of role’ (Ball and Goodson, 1985). Teachers, in short, were present in aggregate through imprecise statistics or were viewed as individuals only as formal role incumbents, mechanistically and unproblematically responding to the powerful expectations of their role set.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s this approach changed somewhat (but from the point of view of the teacher not necessarily for the better). Case study researchers began to examine schooling as a social process, particularly in the manner through which school pupils were ‘processed’. ‘The sympathies of the researchers lay primarily with the pupils, working-class and female pupils in particular, who were the underdogs in the classroom: teachers were the villains of the piece.’ By the late 1970s we discerned a further shift: ‘attention began to be directed to the constraints within which teachers work…. Teachers were transformed from villains to victims and, in some cases, “dupes” of the system within which they were required to operate’ (ibid.: 7).

But this latter characterization of teachers finally opened up the question of ‘how teachers saw their work and their lives’. Writing in 1981, I argued that researchers had not confronted the complexity of the school teacher as an active agent making his or her own history. Researchers, even when they had stopped treating the teacher as numerical aggregate, historical footnote or unproblematic role incumbent, still treated teachers as interchangeable types unchanged by circumstance or time. As a result new research methods were needed:

The pursuit of personal and biographical data might rapidly challenge the assumption of interchangeability. Likewise, by tracing the teacher's life as it evolved over time throughout the teacher's career and through several generations the assumption of timelessness might also be remedied. In understanding something so intensely personal as teaching it is critical we know about the person the teacher is. Our paucity of knowledge in this area is a manifest indictment of the range of our sociological imagination. The life historian pursues the job from his [sic] own perspective, a perspective which emphasises the value of the person's 'own story.'

(Goodson 1981: 69)

In the event, whilst the argument for studies of teachers' lives and careers now began to be more generally pursued in the educational research community, political and economic changes were moving sharply in the opposite direction. The changes in the patterns of political and administrative control over teachers were enormous in the 1980s. In terms of power and visibility, in many ways this represents 'a return to the shadows' for teachers in the face of new curriculum guidelines (in some countries like Britain an all-encompassing national curriculum), teacher assessment and accountability, a barrage of new policy edicts and new patterns of school governance and administration.

Developing a Counter-Culture: Rationales for Studying the Teacher's Life and Work

In one sense the project of 'studying the teacher's life and work' represents an attempt to generate a counter-culture that will resist the tendency to return teachers to the shadows; a counter-culture based upon a research mode that above all places teachers at the centre of the action and seeks to sponsor 'the teacher's voice'. 'The proposal I am recommending is essentially one of reconceptualising educational research so as to assure that the teacher's voice is heard, heard loudly, heard articulately' (Goodson 1991: 36).

Butt, Raymond, McCue and Yamagishi (1992) have argued that:

The notion of the teacher's voice is important in that it carries the tone, the language, the quality, the feelings, that are conveyed by the way a teacher speaks or writes. In a political sense the notion of the teacher's voice addresses the right to speak and be represented. It can represent both the unique individual and the collective voice; one that is characteristic of teachers as compared to other groups.

(Butt et al. 1992: 57)

The sponsoring of the teacher’s voice (if sponsoring can be accepted with its paternalist overtones) is thus counter-cultural in that it works against the grain of power/knowledge as held and produced by politicians and administrators.

Yet if the economic and political times are inauspicious, on the other side, the current ‘postmodernist movement’ provides an emergent climate of support, certainly at the level of research. Foucault has been hugely influential in encouraging researchers to retrieve and represent the voices of their ‘subjects’. Likewise, Carol Gilligan’s superb body of work exemplifies the power of representing the voices of women previously unheard. Above all, the postmodern syntagm sponsors ‘the idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate’ (Harvey 1989:48).

Beyond the general sponsorship of the teacher’s voice there are a range of other rationales for studying the teacher’s life and work. First, such work will provide a valuable range of insights into the new moves to restructure and reform schooling and into new policy concerns and directives. A number of authors have addressed this ‘crisis of reform’ or more specifically ‘crisis of prescription’. I have recently examined the importance and salience of the belief in curriculum as prescription (CAP).

CAP supports the mystique that expertise and control reside within central governments, educational bureaucracies or the university community. Providing that nobody exposes this mystique, the two worlds of ‘prescriptive rhetoric’ and ‘schooling as practice’ can coexist. Both sides benefit from such peaceful coexistence. The agencies of CAP are seen to be ‘in control’ and the schools are seen to be ‘delivering’ (and can carve out a good degree of autonomy if they accept the rules).

However, there is a substantial downside to this ‘historic compromise’. There are costs of complicity in accepting the myth of prescription: above all these involve, in various ways, acceptance of established modes of power relations. Perhaps most importantly the people intimately connected with the day-to-day social construction of curriculum and schooling teachers—are thereby effectively disenfranchised in the ‘discourse of schooling’. To continue to exist, teachers’ day-to-day power must remain unspoken and unrecorded. This is one price of complicity: day-to-day power and autonomy for schools and for teachers are dependent on continuing to accept the fundamental lie (Goodson 1990:300).

In addressing the crisis of prescription and reform, it becomes imperative that we find new ways to sponsor the teacher’s voice. As a particularly generative example, Kathleen Casey’s (1992) work provides a valuable rationale for studying teachers’ lives to understand the much discussed question of ‘teacher drop-out’. She notes that a certain set of taken-for-granted assumptions control the way in which the problem of teacher attrition has normally been defined; one which presumes managerial solutions. She notes how the language confirms this direction, referring to ‘teacher defection’, ‘teacher turnover’ and ‘supply and demand’.

This belief in managerialism and prescription is underpinned by the research methods employed within the academy. She finds that former members of the teaching profession have often been traced statistically, rather than in person, and information has typically been collected from such sources as district files and state departments of public instruction, or through researcher-conceived surveys. The results of the research paradigms employed in the academy have powerful implications for our understanding of the management of educational systems.

The particular configuration of selectivities and omissions which has been built into this research frame slants the shape of its findings. By systematically failing to record the voices of ordinary teachers, the literature on educators’ careers actually silences them. Methodologically, this means that even while investigating an issue where decision-making is paramount, researchers speculate on teachers’ motivations, or at best, survey them with a set of forced-choice options. Theoretically, what emerges is an instrumental view of teachers, one in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Part I: Teacher Professionalism and Conditions of Change
• Part II: The Lives and Work of Teachers
• Part III: Dilemmas of School Leadership