Teachers' perceptions of their professionalism in government primary schools in Karachi,Pakistan

This paper examines teachers' perceptions of their professionalism under conditions of educational reforms in government primary schools in Karachi, Pakistan. Conceiving teacher professionalism in terms of four dimensions (teacher efficacy, teacher practice, teacher leadership and teacher collaboration) it reports a quantitative survey research study of teachers in these schools, where educational reforms have been initiated. One conclusion from the study is that such teachers do perceive themselves as professionals—a finding that is counter to the often‐held beliefs about these teachers. The paper argues that it is important to regard teachers as professionals, capable of further enhancing their own professionalism, for improvement in the quality of teaching and learning in the government primary schools in Karachi.     

Teacher professionalism and cultural diversity: Skills, knowledge and values for a changing Australia

In this paper I critically examine the changing nature of teacher professionalism in relation to educational policy-making, specifically, the new national policy for values education in Australian schools, and a newly endorsedCultural Understandings syllabus for teaching in New South Wales' secondary schools. I argue that these policy changes connect teachers' work to a broad citizenship agenda, where values formation is increasingly seen as a core responsibility of teachers, and intercultural education is proposed as a domestic strategy for social cohesion.     

Professional autonomy versus managerial control: The experience of teachers in an english primary school

This article examines the relationship between primary teachers' professional autonomy and the increasing managerial control over teachers' work. It considers how the education policies of successive Conservative and New Labour administrations in Britain have tightened central control over education undermining teacher discretion and directly impacting upon the labour process of the professionals concerned. The research was undertaken in an English primary school and data gathered in a variety of contexts including observations of the teachers in classrooms and the staff room, a governors/parents meeting, informal conversations and a series of semi-structured interviews with staff. The study explores how teachers make sense of the managerial culture in education, and how this is reconciled with their ideas about teaching and learning, and their professional interests and individual career aspirations. Structuration theory (Giddens, 1976, 1979, 1984) is used as a theoretical framework to explore whether there is conflict between teachers' professionalism and the new managerialism and examine how primary teachers make sense of this inextricable relationship.     

新课程理念下教师身份认同的重新解读

在新课程理念的指引下,教师的身份认同在课程、教学、教师与同事的关系以及教师与家长的关系等层面必将发生一些转变。即教师要从官定的课程执行者向“生本”的课程设计者和共同开发者转变;教师要从以往的“高高在上者”向“共同遭遇者”转变,对学生实施“对话教学”;教师的群体文化要从“马赛克文化”向团结、互助和合作文化转变;教师要从“代理家长”,与家长缺乏合作向吸引家长参与,与家长共同管理学生转变。     

The Rise of the New Professionals? The restructuring of primary teachers’ work and professionalism

This article explores teachers’ reactions to changing management cultures and argues for a complex reading of their responses. Data from an ethnographic study of a primary school are used to illustrate the restructuring of the teachers’ work since the mid‐1980s. Different teacher strategies were developed in response to changes in the managerial control of their work and dominant management constructions of professionalism. Whereas teachers in an occupational culture, the ‘old professionals’, largely resisted the changes but subsequently left the school or left teaching, the ‘new professionals’ complied with some of management's changed expectations of them, but resisted others. In the new managerialist culture the teachers experienced new forms of control and their roles increasingly included managerial tasks. The article concludes by suggesting that measures for policing teachers’ work, such as inspection and school self‐management may limit the spaces in which teachers can use strategies of resistance within accommodation.     

农村学校家长参与的低迷现象研究——专业主义、不平等关系与家校区隔

本研究以一项为期一年的民族志调查为基础,旨在从教师访谈数据中揭示农村家长参与学校教育的障碍。在理论层面,本研究着眼于教师的专业身份及其对他们对于家长参与建构性理解的影响。在数据分析层面,本研究指出,接受访谈的教师倾向于认为家长在学校教育中的角色是"边缘性"的辅助角色,家长常被看作教师的追随者,而不是平等的合作伙伴,而教师则视自己为专业的工作者,其专业判断不容质疑。在行动层面,家长不同形式的参与又是教师构建专业身份的重要实践,常被看作鼓励"先进"、解决"后进"问题的重要手段,其符号意义要高过实质意义。本研究从教师的角度出发解释农村学校家长参与的低迷现象,是对本领域文献的一项重要补充,有着重要的理论意义。     

The role of parents in special education: the notion of partnership revised

ABSTRACT

While parents' role in schools has attracted growing attention in educational research, very few researchers have directed any interest to the role of parents in special education. In this paper, we focus upon the concept of partnership, relating our analyses of interviews with classroom teachers and parents to the notion of partnership as described and explored by different researchers. Our main focus is on how teachers describe and perceive their relation to parents, and how parents experience their relation to the school. Our analysis shows that the relationship between teachers and parents seems to contain some other features than those reflected in the existing literature on parents’ role in education. To extract some of these features based on our data, we construct two roles: parents as ‘implementers’ and parents as ‘clients’, which we believe better captures the distinctive feature of the role of parents in special education. ‘Implementer’ implies parents being given responsibility for following up aims and measures set by the school, with very little possibility to influence how things are being done. ‘Clients’ occur when teachers see parents as part of their child's problem. Both roles place parents in a subordinate and powerless relationship with the school, as a result of a strong inequality of power between parents and schools. This inequality is caused, among other factors, by the socially defined power relationship between laypersons and professionals, and the stigma attached to special education which restrains parents from forming any collective resistance.     

The quandary of quantification: data,numbers and teachers’ learning

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon recent theorising of numbers and data, and applications to schooling, this paper reveals how tensions between more accountability-oriented logics, and more contextually-situated conceptions of engagement with data, played out in one school in a regional community in northern Queensland, Australia. The research reveals that at the same time teachers’ work and learning were heavily influenced by more reductive processes of quantification to account for teachers’ practices, teachers also sought to draw upon the attention to numeric markers of student achievement to foster more substantive teacher learning for student learning. These tensions were expressed in relation to: efforts to foster improved student learning through collection of evidence via ‘short-term data cycles’; engagement in various ‘data conversations’ with senior members of staff, and coaching by more experienced teachers, and; broader teacher learning initiatives focused on enhancing outcomes for specified groups of students identified as able to perform at higher levels of attainment. The research cautions that such practices present a quandary; even as broader processes of quantification of education may stimulate instances of more ongoing, substantive teacher learning for student learning, more performative applications of these numbers and data mitigate against the educative potential of such practices, and substantive learning for all students.     

The professionalization of Hong Kong teachers: Dilemma between technical rationality and individual autonomy

This article studies the dilemma between professionalization and professionalism in the development of teaching into a bureaucratic organization in Hong Kong. Professionalization and bureucractization are simultaneous processes. Teaching as an occupation has grown from a state of idiosyncrasy to a profession with defined boundaries. However, achieving system efficiency and technical rationality, both features of bureaucracy, could undermine or suppress teachers’ individual autonomy. Thus, bureaucratization supports professionalization by raising the status of teaching, but undermines professionalism by constraining teachers’ autonomy. The article examines the changing pattern of stratification and how it shaped the relationship between the professionalization, bureaucratization and professionalism of teaching in Hong Kong. It argues that teaching cannot be a true profession without realizing professionalism, and that teacher education has a central role in the drive towards it. Key Words: Hong Kong teachers, teacher education, professionalization, professionalism, stratification     

Can autonomy be imposed? Examining teacher (re)positioning during the ongoing curriculum change in Cyprus

For the past few years, the Republic of Cyprus has been pursuing a major educational reform across all levels of mandatory education, focusing especially on curriculum change, for the implementation of which in-service teachers have undergone a series of professional development seminars. Individual and focus group interviews with in-service elementary teachers, regarding their sense of professionalism within this curriculum change process, revealed that teachers positioned themselves largely onto different points on a continuum. These are conceptualized as positions veering between teachers’ sense of minimum and maximum autonomy over their participation in the development and introduction of the new official curriculum. Framed by a traditionally centralized context, these positions were discursively negotiated in contradictory ways which allowed multiple positionings by each teacher. The paper concludes with the implications of these findings for understanding teacher professionalism and positioning, as well as for considering how this might relate to curriculum change and implementation processes.     

Seeking the Levers of Change: Participant Attitudes and School Improvement

In this paper we argue that to improve schools we must change the relationships between teachers, parents, and students to render these more satisfying to all parties. Using data collected as part of a long‐term project, we show that certain aspects of teacher practice have a strong impact upon student and parent attitudes, and hence upon their ratings of schools; we contend that improving schools requires attention to these powerful attitudinal levers of change.     

Learning Together: The Student/Parent/Teacher Triad

This report contains an analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data on participant perceptions of the co‐production of learning. It constitutes a refinement of the working model of the triadic relationship between parents, students, and teachers which was the basis of previous reports (Coleman, Collinge, & Seifert, 1992; Coleman, Collinge, & Tabin, 1992; Coleman & Tabin, 1992; Coleman & Collinge, 1991). Given our earlier findings the focus in this paper is upon the theme of collaboration, which is emerging as one critical element in the relationships within the student/teacher/parent triad.

The analysis shows that there are sharp differences in perceptions of collaboration between different triad members. Collaboration between parents and students is perceived to be both strong and balanced in initiation. Teachers show little awareness of its strength. Collaboration between teachers and parents is perceived by both to be one‐sided; each party sees the other as unresponsive. It is invisible to students. Collaboration between students and teachers varies between classrooms, and seems to be based upon the teachers’ perception of student acceptance of responsibility; parents are very keenly aware of this collaboration where it exists. Classroom level differences are also strong; teacher attitudes and practices clearly determine the extent of collaboration.

In British Columbia parent and student attitudes towards classrooms and teachers are affected, sometimes strongly, by teacher practices of parent involvement. These attitudes contribute to parent and student rating of particular schools.     

Classroom disruptions,the teacher–student relationship and classroom management from the perspective of teachers,students and external observers: a multimethod approach

This study used questionnaires and systematic behavioural observations to examine how teachers, students and external observers perceived classroom disruptions, the teacher–student relationship and classroom management in grade 5 and 6 classrooms in Switzerland. The questionnaire showed that the students of a class agreed to a certain extent in their ratings of classroom disruptions, the teacher–student relationship and classroom management. Comparison of teachers’ and students’ ratings showed that agreement on these constructs varied. We found weak to moderate agreement on classroom disruptions, a weak correspondence for the teacher–student relationship, and no association on classroom management. The results of the behavioural observation showed a moderate agreement between external observers’ and students’ ratings, but no association between external observers’ and class teachers’ ratings and only a weak correspondence with the subject teacher ratings. Thus external observers’ low-inference observations corresponded far better with students’ than teachers’ ratings. To sum up, students, teachers and observers perceive classroom processes differently.

     

Translating policy: governmentality and the reflective teacher

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power or government and how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform.     

Re-imagining teachers’ identity and professionalism under the condition of international education

Around the world, 4.3 million students are engaged in international education each year. However, there is a paucity in theory and empirical research on teachers’ professionalism in international education. This paper aims to fill out this gap and contribute to our understanding of teachers’ changing roles and identity due to the impact of internationalisation and the growth of international students. Drawing on positioning theory as a conceptual framework to understand teachers’ roles and identity, this paper shows the emergence of teacher sub-identities as a reciprocal intercultural learner and an adaptive agent. It argues that these sub-identities are central to teachers’ development of cosmopolitan qualities in the contemporary context of international education.     

Pedagogical bricolage and teacher agency: Towards a culture of creative professionalism

The way in which educators choose to engage with learners and to offer opportunities to share knowledge of both the physical world and the world of ideas is an ongoing area of international research interest but remains diffuse and difficult to systematise. This idiosyncratic quality underscores the privileged position of teachers as creative professionals. By exploring Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conception of how and for what purpose we share knowledge within society, this paper explores the relationship between perceptions of teachers’ professional role and the challenges they face working within formal education systems. The artisan quality of teachers’ practice, gained through experience, association and personal commitment, makes possible a visualisation of teacher professionalism as bricolage that, when read alongside theories of teacher agency, generates an affirmative picture of how teacher professionalism may be reframed as creative and responsive rather than homogenous and mechanistic.     

Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times

This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of governance to minimise the risk of adverse student behaviour, maximise student outcomes on standardised tests, and provide teachers with discrete learning experiences construed as improving such outcomes. The sum total of these foci is the construction of education as an increasingly ‘risky business’ which employs a myriad of products and tests to manage perceived and actual risks. The paper also reveals how these products and processes constitute student misbehaviour and inadequate teacher and student learning as ‘risk objects’ requiring constant intervention, but which also inhibit inclusion in schooling settings, and challenge teachers’ professionalism.     

Theorising teacher professionalism as an enacted discourse of power

In this article I elaborate a theoretical framework for examining teacher professionalism as an enacted discourse of power. Central to this framework is an understanding of professionalism as a process that relates to the ways teachers attempt to influence the quality and character of their work. For subject teaching associations this process connects to issues of power such as teacher participation in educational policy‐making, and the advocacy of subject interests. In this article I theorise professionalism as enacted by subject teaching associations, arguing that the enacted form is shaped by changing structural, cultural and agential variables. Finally, I explore the interactive relationship between structure, culture and agency in the work of subject teaching associations, and present a working model through which enacted professionalism may be analysed and interpreted.     

A Conversation of Care: Unpacking and Engaging Pre-service Teacher Ideologies

Caring relationships are a core component in effective classrooms, and safe learning environments. As such, it is important for pre-service teachers to reflect on their own perceptions and experience regarding care and care within the classroom if they are to build upon that knowledge and grow as caring educators. In addition, teacher educators can learn more about the developing theories of care that exist within college classrooms, and utilize this knowledge in working with pre-service teachers to understand the power of care and relationships between students and teachers. The purpose of this article is to examine pre-service teacher perceptions of “care” and caring relationships within the classroom. How do pre-service teachers define “care”, and how do their experiences align with their personal beliefs? More importantly, how do these perspectives shape their teacher identity?     

INVENTING THE CHARTERED TEACHER

ABSTRACT:  This paper explores the effects of enacting a collaborative and enquiry based model of teacher professionalism in the UK. Based on work with Chartered Teachers in Scotland, it indicates that the barriers to changing the basis of teacher professionalism are complex and multi-faceted because of the contested nature of teachers' work identities. Chartered Teacher status is achieved by qualification against an occupational standard which positions those who attain it as leading teachers, exerting a significant influence with their colleagues to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools. This paper looks at some of the conceptual and practical difficulties faced by Chartered Teachers as they try to enact what this new 'status' means. It argues that those with an interest in the professional development of teachers need to position themselves as knowing agents in the complex systemic and political aspects of changing practice in schools.