Talking about education: exploring the significance of teachers’ talk for teacher agency

Abstract

The interest in teachers’ discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers’ professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman’s distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab’s interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching. Within the research, a distinction can be found between a more narrow approach that focuses on teachers’ propositional or theoretical knowledge and a more encompassing approach in which teachers’ knowledge is not only the knowledge for teachers generated elsewhere, but also the knowledge of teachers. This is the ‘stock of knowledge’ gained from a range of sources and experiences, including teachers’ ongoing engagement with the practice of teaching itself. In this paper, we focus on the role of teachers’ talk in their achievement of agency. We explore how, in what way and to what extent such talk helps or hinders teachers in exerting control over and giving direction to their everyday practices, bearing in mind that such practices are not just the outcome of teachers’ judgements and actions, but are also shaped by the structures and cultures within which teachers work.     

'A democracy tempered by the rate of exchange': Audit culture and the sell-out of progressive writing curriculum

In this article, the authors draw on the concept of 'audit culture' to examine the political and professional implications for teachers emerging from contemporary, commercially distributed, writing programmes. They argue that, in adapting what began as a progressive understanding of children's writing and teacher professionalism for commercial distribution, fundamental values and concerns have been lost. Drawing on the work of James Britton, the authors assert that the market ideologies of audit culture have turned the idea of teacher professionalism on its head, naming the professional not as the teacher who continually develops her/his expertise through intellectual inquiry into the lives, strengths and needs of the children in the classroom but, rather, as the teacher who submits her/himself to constant measures of fidelity to a particlar programme, and to documentation of practices, supervision and correction. The authors argue for a return to the values of Jimmy Britton: commitment to the promotion of play, social engagmentment, freedom of thought and intellectual and emotional experimentation.     

教师专业化与教师专业责任——美国教师专业化发展的新路径

教师的专业发展是伴随着教师的专业责任的强化而发展的。教师专业责任的强化有赖于建立一套共负的专业责任体系和有效的评价机制,以确保教师在自主发展和教育教学过程中承担相应的责任,进而促进教师的专业化发展。     

从师徒制看高中英语教师专业成长

通过观察、实录和访谈开展高中英语教师第一学年的师徒带教跟踪研究,结果表明:师徒制运行背景下高中英语教师专业成长特点是实践性、长期性、动态性和环境依托性,主要表现为学科教学能力、职业意识态度和人际交往关系的变化,其影响因素是师徒带教、反思学习、实践群体及教育环境。     

Teachers’ voice,power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

This article examines Slovak early years teachers’ concerns with conceptions of teacher professionalism. It suggests that there is a mismatch between understandings of professionalism, policy aspirations and the attitudes of teachers to their own professionalism, and that this mismatch fuels early years teachers’ sense of agency. These tensions between conceptions of professionalism, teaching practice and actual working conditions have led to a ground-up approach to self-governance within the early years teacher workforce. We analyse teachers’ discussions in an early years online forum of 12,500 members that was started and remains governed by the teachers themselves. It represents in itself a very particular attitude and response to the need to determine what it means to be a professional teacher. This analysis examines intersections of policy, quality and professionalism, and highlights considerations of power and voice, and the complexities of uncertainty and change. The article concludes with the suggestion that teacher attitudes, power and agency are impacted in unpredictable ways by the policy landscape.     

Preparing teachers for professional learning: is there a future for teacher education in new teacher induction?

Today the quality of teachers is held to be increasingly important yet there continue to be doubts about whether teacher education programs graduate teachers ready to meet the challenges of their initial years of teaching. In some jurisdictions, other agencies (Ministries of Education, school districts, and private providers) are supplementing the work of teacher education through the introduction of new teacher induction programs which have become favoured policy initiatives to enhance new teacher transition, retention and quality. Evidence suggests that induction and mentoring increase teacher retention and ensure more effective socialisation of new teachers into the school culture. In spite of their growing popularity, the degree to which induction programs complement teacher education and/or impact new teacher professional learning remains unclear. In this paper the authors report a secondary analysis of data from an evaluation of the New Teacher Induction Program in Ontario, Canada to consider the implications for the future of teacher education by asking: What are the challenges facing new teachers? In what ways does the induction program support new teacher professional learning? What are the major implications for the future of teacher education?     

Contested discourses of teacher professionalism: current tensions between education policy and teachers’ union

This article addresses constructions and redefinitions of teacher professionalism by focusing on the discursive negotiations between the government and the teachers’ union in Norway. Based on an examination of three white papers on teacher education from the past 15?years and policy documents put forth by the Union of Education Norway during the past decade, the authors argue that new constructions of teacher professionalism are produced both by the government and from within the teachers’ union. However, there are differences between the government and the teachers’ union concerning what the main aspects of teacher professionalism are. The government emphasises teacher accountability, research-based practice and specialisation. By contrast, the teachers’ union highlights research-informed practice, responsibility for educational quality and professional ethics. There are three main areas of discursive struggle focused by the teachers’ union: the resistance to accountability policies, the redefining of research-based practice and the lengthening of teacher education. The authors argue that the teachers’ union is adopting an increasingly more active approach, thereby also challenging the idea that the teachers’ union is less interested in developing and taking responsibility for the quality of school education.     

Preparing Teachers for Anti‐oppressive Education: International movements

While theories and recommendations continue to proliferate in the educational research literature on what it means to teach towards social justice and to prepare teachers for such teaching, so do concerns that these theories and recommendations fail to account for the ways that the contexts of teaching—cultural contexts, national contexts, political contexts—always affect teaching in idiosyncratic, unpredictable and even contradictory ways. Given that much educational research fails to trouble the US‐centric nature of prevailing conceptions of social justice and teacher education, it is important to learn about the unique as well as shared challenges facing teacher educators around the globe. In this article, teacher educators from Asia, Africa, North America and South America offer a sampling of initiatives in anti‐oppressive teacher education; that is, initiatives to prepare teachers to teach various subject matters to various age groups, addressing various forms of oppression in various cultural and community contexts.     

英国合格教师资格标准修订简介

20世纪80年代以来,在世界教师专业化运动的大背景下,英国政府开始对合格教师资格标准进行明确规定,以提高教师质量和促进教师个人专业发展.文章在对以往英国合格教师资格标准进行梳理的基础上,对2006年5月英国教育与技能部(DfES)公布的《教师专业标准框架修订草案》中的合格教师资格标准进行了介绍,并对其特点进行了分析.     

Appropriating professionalism: restructuring the official knowledge base of England’s ‘modernised’ teaching profession

The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to ‘modernisation’. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of governmental appropriation of professionalism: the specification by the Training and Development Agency for Schools of new ‘standards’ for both initial teacher training and teachers’ subsequent career progression. It is argued that although this enterprise represents itself as a species of purely common‐sense reform, it is in fact a mode of competency training that is rooted in selective appropriation of elements of post‐fordist management theory and a loose form of behaviourist psychology. The capacity of this training discourse to suppress awareness of its own presuppositions and of alternative or competing conceptions of professions and professionalism is explored.     

What are white progressive masculinities? Counternarratives and contradictions of committed white male teachers in inner-city schools

This life history reflection aims to constitute, generate, and proliferate complex progressive masculinities for male teachers and advance notions of progressive masculinities writ large in education and elsewhere. This reflection, working with life story interviews of white male teachers in US inner-city schools, positions this research within the researcher's life history. Informed by existing literatures on male teachers emphasising crisis-shortage and gender workplace issues, this reflection expands these literatures by developing life narrative concepts that replace static masculinities with narrativised identifications, lived counternarratives, and contradictory progressive masculinities. Key to respondents' progressive masculinities, this life history reflection provides four lived counternarratives including respondents' illegal drug use, process spirituality, alternative media, and critical politics. Through these counternarratives, respondents' contradictory progressive masculinities emerge as bifurcated phenomena that reify privileges yet drive respondents, precariously situated between nihilistic impotency and political potential, towards passively conjugated alliances with subaltern others.