Teachers' Professional Lives

Ivor F. Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135717308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text provides a discussion of the meaning of teacher professionalism and how it can be improved.

Chapter 1
Teachers’ Professional Lives:
Aspirations and Actualities

Andy Hargreaves and Ivor Goodson

Introduction

The struggle of teachers for professional recognition and for the associated working conditions and rewards that might bring it about has a long and chequered history. More pay, higher status, greater autonomy, increased self-regulation and improved standards of training—these recurrent themes have underscored the individual and collective struggles of teachers for many decades. Yet, notwithstanding a few historical and geographical exceptions such as the substantial salaries achieved by Canadian teachers in the 1970s, the high degree of autonomy over curriculum development and decision-making enjoyed by British teachers in the 1960s and early 1970s (Grace, 1987) and the conversion of teaching to an all-graduate profession during the same period almost everywhere, the project of professionalization has been steadfastly resisted by cost-conscious, and control-centred governments and bureaucracies. Collectively and individually, teachers themselves have also often seemed ambivalent about whether their identity is that of professionals or cultural workers. They have therefore been uncertain and inconsistent about whether they should pursue middle class status in ‘acceptable professional’ ways, or use the collective strategies of union bargaining to defend their interests (Ginsburg et al., 1980; Carlson, 1992; Bascia, 1994).

For these reasons and others, teacher professionalization has been a historically precarious project: resisted by governments, bureaucracies and business interests without, and undermined by ambiguities of loyalty, strategy and identity within. Recent years have seen an intriguing twist in this familiar tale, however. Across many parts of the world, teacher professionalization is now being sponsored with exceptional vigour by governments, bureaucracies and big business. There seems to be an enormous interest, politically and administratively in identifying, codifying and applying professional standards of practice to the teaching force. A National Board of Professional Teaching Standards has been established in the United States, which teachers can choose to join by having their knowledge and skills inspected and certified by their peers. In England and Wales, the creation of a General Teaching Council has been proclaimed as a policy priority by the opposition Labour Party. In Australia, several states have created career ladder structures for newly designated ‘advanced skills teachers’, who receive modest increments of pay for excellence in classroom teaching and teacher leadership, as attested to by their peers. Nationally, Australian teacher unions and state employers have also jointly established a standard-certifying Council of Teachers, with voluntary membership, much on the lines of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards in the USA, The Canadian province of Ontario has gone further than this and followed the recommendations of a Royal Commission on Learning by legislating a self-regulating Teachers’ Council or College of Teachers as it is known, which all teachers will be required to join if they are to be granted certificates to practise. This self-regulating college or council, will draw up and maintain an official register of teachers, define standards of practice, establish a province-wide framework for professional learning and leadership training, and accredit all programmes of teacher education (including postgraduate programmes of teacher preparation that have been legislatively lengthened to two-years).

Alongside these initiatives which might seem to support the project of teacher professionalization are ones in other jurisdictions which appear categorically bent on achieving just the opposite effect. In a number of American states, for example, teachers have been compelled to take written tests of basic competency in order to retain their qualifications to teach. Moreover, continuing conditions of low pay where US teachers earn 20 per cent to 30 per cent less than other similarly educated workers, more competition for the skills of able women from fields of employment outside teaching, the creation of alternate certification arrangements to recruit teachers for the inner cities, and difficulties of finding qualified teachers in a number of shortage subject areas, have led to a position where, in 1991, one in four new entrants to teaching held a substandard certificate or none at all (Darling-Hammond, 1994, p. 8). Indeed the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in education actually declined by over 50 per cent between 1972 and 1987 (p.).

The Government of England and Wales, meanwhile, has started to dig up and destroy some of the traditional paths to professionalization by making postgraduate courses of preparation for secondary teachers predominantly school-based, by establishing schemes to allocate funds directly to schools rather than universities as centres of teacher training, and by attenuating the links between teacher training and universities in general (A.Hargreaves, 1995; Barton et al., 1994). More broadly, while movements towards site-based management in schools may have involved teachers more in school development planning and collective decision-making, this has often been in a context where overall budgets have been reduced (‘we give you less; you allocate it’); where many of the major areas of decision-making in terms of curriculum outcomes and testing requirements have been arrogated to the centre (‘we set the ends: you deliver the means’); and where what schools and teachers are required to manage is downloaded administrivia rather than issues of fundamental purpose and direction (‘we control; you manage’) (Robertson, 1993). As Darling-Hammond (1993) has noted, ‘we see states passing laws that pay lip service to teacher professionalism while, with the other hand, they erect greater restraints on curricula, textbooks, tests and teaching methods’ (p.). Paradoxically, some of the jurisdictions that have been most proactive on teacher professionalization issuesare the selfsame ones that have capped teachers’ salaries (e.g., Ontario, Canada), made sweeping job cuts (e.g., Victoria, Australia) or reduced resourcing for education in general. Persuasive rhetorics of professionalization all too often seem to be accompanied by conditions where professionalization is actually being dismantled.

Contemporary projects of teacher professionalization therefore seem paradoxical, confused and contradictory. Teacher professionalization appears to be advancing in some respects; retreating in others. In part, this may come down to a simple distinction between rhetoric and reality. In some ways, the title of our book, Teachers’ Professional Lives, perhaps speaks more to aspirations than actualities. Teachers deserve and demand professional lives but some of the new directions and developments may mean that this historic aspiration is being seriously threatened. Somehow, Teachers’ Proletarianized Lives does not have the same ring to it (not, we thought, the optimistic, motivational stuff of a best selling book!). But to some extent, economic and policy forces are indeed pushing the life and work of the teacher in disturbing directions. As ‘fast capitalism’ is eroding workers’ lives generally, these forces are also beginning to attack the professional lives of teachers through reduced resources, wage restraints and the restructuring of what teachers are expected to do. For this reason, we have adopted the title of our book knowingly: cognizant of the fact that while the aspiration is legitimate, the possibilities are perilous. Hence the title of this book provides a benchmark, a desirable aspirational plateau, from which to scrutinize new developments and directions in the teacher’s life and work.

A second way to interpret the seeming paradoxes of teacher professionalization is to see that some parts of the teacher’s work are becoming reprofessionalized in ways that involve broader tasks, greater complexity, more sophisticated judgment, and collective decision-making among colleagues, while other parts of the work are becoming deprofessionalized in terms of more pragmatic training, reduced discretion over goals and purposes, and increased dependence on detailed learning outcomes prescribed by others (e.g., Barton et al., 1994). We will say more about these processes of deprofessionalization and reprofessionalization a little later.

Thirdly, governmental and administrative sponsorship of teacher professionalization may also signal a shift in the steering mechanisms the State uses to regulate education. As states in fiscal crisis find they are unable to sustain large educational bureaucracies and their more direct forms of administrative control, the tasks and costs of licensing and registering teachers, monitoring standards of conduct and practice, handling promotions and securing dismissals can be handed over to teachers themselves as matters for self-regulation (paid for by member subscription!), as can the detailed delivery of centrally defined outcomes through school development planning, site-based decision-making and the like. Yet self-regulation and collegial decision-making are not simply cynical in their origin and consequences. The empowering effects of these professionalizing tendencies for building strong senses of professional competence and community among teachers should not be underestimated (Talbert and McLaughlin, 1994). Teacher professionalization may well mark a shift in the mechanisms of state steering (through self-regulation of means) and in opportunities for empowerment as well. How these twin tendencies play out in practice is an important subject for investigation and analysis.

The aspiration for teachers to have professional lives is not a given phenomenon but a contested one, then. It marks a struggle to redefine the work of teaching by governments, administrators, business and teachers themselves. Achieving the actuality of professional lives in teaching is not easy. Nor is it totally clear what this aspiration for professional lives might mean, or entail, even if it could be realized.

What it means to be professional, to show professionalism or to pursue professionalization is not universally agreed or understood. Some writers, including several in this volume, do draw an important distinction between professionalization as a social and political project or mission designed to enhance the interests of an occupational group, and professionalism as something which defines and articulates the quality and character of people’s actions within that group. But beyond this, what counts as professional knowledge and professional action in teaching is open to many different interpretations. Current debates about teacher professionalism and professionalization reveal at least five different often overlapping discourses which carry different connotations of what it means for teachers to be professionals. These discourses are ones that we call classical professionalism, flexible professionalism, practical professionalism, extended professionalism and complex professionalism. We then want to sketch out a preliminary agenda for a sixth form of teacher professionalism—which we call postmodern professionalism.

In the remainder of this opening chapter, we want to describe and analyse these discourses, along with their claims and assumptions regarding teacher professionalism and professionalization. We will examine to what extent and in what ways these discourses advance the cause of professionalization (and whether that is altogether a good thing). We will also investigate whether conversely and perversely, the discourses foster contrary processes of deprofessionalization too. Moreover, we will pose questions as to whether projects of professionalization and commitments to professionalism seem to work together in tandem or in contrary directions. As we undertake this analysis, we will draw on the chapters published in this collection. These chapters have been solicited to highlight the ordinary conceptions of professionalism and professional knowledge that are now pervasive in teaching, and to illuminate the paths which the project of teacher professionalization appears to be following.

Forms of Professionalism

Classical Professionalism

Classical professionalism has historically rested on the exemplary claims to professional status of law and medicine. In seeking professional status and recognition, it is the claims of these highly ranked, publicly recognizable and largely masculine professions that teachers have usually tried to emulate—not the less recognizable professions like architecture or dentistry, and certainly not the more female (and arguably more closely related) ‘semi-professions’ (Etzioni, 1969) of nursing, social work or librarianship (Soder, 1990).

What Lindblad (1993) has called a naive view of professionalism has tended to endorse and celebrate high status professionals’ views of themselves (e.g., Parsons, 1954).

By and large, it was assumed that those in professions were benign and altruistic beings serving society by combining the virtues of rationality, technique, control and codes of ethics, and only incidentally (albeit deservedly) reaping pecuniary and other rewards. (Soder, 1990, pp. 38–9)

Within this naive or benign view, ‘professions’ (modelled after law and medicine) have been characterized as having a specialized knowledge base or shared technical culture; a strong service ethic with a commitment to meeting clients’ needs; and self-regulated, collegial control rather than external bureaucratic control over recruitment and training, codes of ethics and standards of practice. Much of the literature on teacher professionalism and professionalization has measured teachers’ work and occupational status against these criteria, and found them largely wanting. In his classic study of school teachers, Lortie (1975, p. 23) argued that teaching was only ‘partially professionalized’ at best. ‘Although teachers have managed to dull the edges of administrative power, they continue to be employed subordinates’ (p.).

Let’s look at just one of the characteristics of a profession in the classical sense, that of a shared technical culture, and see how well teaching fares in relation to it. In an occupation where teachers gave high primacy to personal experience, Lortie found little evidence of a ‘shared technical culture of teaching’ (pp.). Indeed, workplace conditions of classroom isolation discouraged teachers from sharing and developing the technical aspects of their work (also Little, 1984; Rosenholtz, 1989; Flinders, 1988). David Hargreaves (1980) argued that secondary school teachers might claim some semblance of technical expertise in the knowledge base of their subject matter (although school subject knowledge often lagged seriously behind the university disciplines themselves), but primary or elementary teachers, stripped of any subject pretensions, had few shared technical conceptions and little specialized language concerning child development or pedagogy. On most matters, Philip Jackson (1968) argued, teachers’ language was quite indistinguishable from ordinary language. Practical experience, not scientific theory was what teachers found most useful in their work (A.Hargreaves, 1984). Teaching was neither technical...