Teacher professional identity: competing discourses,competing outcomes

This paper focuses on issues of the professional identity of teachers in Australia under conditions of significant change in government policy and educational restructuring. Two discourses, democratic and managerial professionalism are identified which are shaping the professional identity of teachers. Democratic professionalism is emerging from the profession itself while managerialist professionalism is being reinforced by employing authorities through their policies on teacher professional development with their emphasis on accountability and effectiveness. The second part of the paper examines the types of professional identity emerging from these discourses. The two identities identified are the entrepreneurial and the activist identity. While these identities are not fixed, nevertheless at various times and in various contexts teachers may move between these two professional identities.     

教师专业化:传统智慧与现代实践

教师专业化包括教师职业专业化和教师教育专业化两方面内容,既是过程也是结果。从结果看,教师专业知识(素养)结构应由通识性知识、本体性知识、素养性知识、条件性知识、行为性知识、实践性知识等几方面知识所组成。从过程看,教师教育专业化是个包括理论与实践两方面和职前教育、上岗培训、在职训练、职后进修四个环节以及脱产和不脱产两种形式的终身一体化过程。中国教育发展史上具有丰富的教师专业化思想。当前,必须借鉴传统教师智慧,进行理论和制度双重创新,才能推进教师专业化。     

Learning to be a doctor while learning anatomy!

This article presents results from a longitudinal study following a cohort of medical students. Semistructured interviews are conducted every year, in which the students tell about their experiences learning medicine, their daily life, and their social activities in relation to university. The aim of the study is to analyze how medical students develop their professional competencies, values, and attitudes. This article focuses on the medical student's professional development in relation to the process of studying and learning anatomy. We analyze interviews conducted while the students are in their third and fifth semester. Anatomy plays a significant role in the medical student's educational process, on both a cognitive and emotional level. It seems that students in learning the subject matter adapt to fundamental values in the medical profession and are thus transformed into real medical students, sharing a unique experience. The implications for curricular development and professionalism are discussed, and this article argues that the issue of professionalism must be addressed in the educational process in the preclinical years and in relation to the basic sciences. Anat Sci Ed 2008. © 2008 American Association of Anatomists.     

Standards-based accountability: reification,responsibility and the ethical subject

Over the last two decades, teachers in Australia have witnessed multiple incarnations of the idea of ‘educational accountability’ and its enactment. Research into this phenomenon of educational policy and practice has revealed various layers of the concept, particularly its professional, bureaucratic, political and cultural dimensions that are central to the restructuring of educational governance and the reorganization of teachers’ work. Today, accountability constitutes a core concept of neoliberal policy-making in education, both fashioning and normalizing what counts as teacher professionalism in the ‘audit society.’ This article focuses specifically on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia, and raises questions about the impact of this reform on the work practices of English literacy teachers in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. The article traces the ways in which teachers’ work is increasingly being mediated by standardised literacy testing to show how these teachers grapple with the tensions between state-wide mandates and a sense of their professional responsibility for their students.     

Restructuring teachers’ work‐lives and knowledge in England and Spain

This article explores the restructuring of education in England and Spain. Against a presumably homogeneous global streamlining of educational systems according to competition‐driven goals, the comparison of teachers’ work‐lives and professional knowledge evidences a variety of experiences under‐represented in discourses on global restructuring. Our argument highlights how in England political reforms have worked their way deep into the working lives of professionals, giving rise to a ‘managerial’ model of professionalism, whereas in Spain reforms are more loosely coupled with teachers’ work, favoring a ‘social service’‐oriented model. However, despite the different professional ideals, teachers uniformly stressed the challenges they face were predominantly due to broader social transformations for which policy reforms provided few if any remedies. Our study emphasizes the variety of educational reforms and teachers’ experiences in the European context and argues further educational change should be bound to the historical trajectory and the concrete needs of the professionals in question.     

Te Kotahitanga: Addressing educational disparities facing Māori students in New Zealand

The major challenges facing education in New Zealand today are the continuing social, economic and political disparities within our nation, primarily between the descendants of the European colonisers and the Indigenous Māori people. These disparities are also reflected in educational outcomes. In this paper, an Indigenous Māori Peoples' solution to the problems of educational disparities is detailed. Te Kotahitanga is a research and professional development project that seeks to improve the educational achievement of Māori students in mainstream secondary schools. Students ‘voices’ were used to inform the development of the project in a variety of ways: firstly to identify various discursive positions related to Māori student learning; secondly, to develop professional development activities, and thirdly, to create an Effective Teaching Profile. The paper concludes by identifying how implementing the Effective Teaching Profile addresses educational disparities.     

Contracting Headteachers as Leaders: an analysis of the NPQH

Within the restructuring of the public sector there is a complex process involving challenges to professional practice. This paper seeks to describe and understand this through analysing the integration of commercial contracting into the professional practice and status of headteachers. It is argued that a key feature of this process is training and this is the context in which a critical evaluation of the National Standards for Headteachers combined with the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers (NPQH) is located. Commercial contracting is being overlain on top of democratic notions and practices of the social contract, and centrist determined NPQH training and assessment is being overlain on top of pluralist professional development opportunities. Aspiring and in‐post headteachers are being presented with a model of contractual leadership which is in tension with educational values and it is argued that as a consequence alternative and more humane traditions are being marginalised     

Professional learning in community: teachers and academic partners focused on disadvantaged students in schooling and higher education

This paper reports on the work of a small group of Education academics to build a professional learning community in a regional university in the north of England. Their efforts form part of a ‘Leading Learning’ school–university partnership serving schools in disadvantaged communities in inner city Leeds. This is designed to support teachers’ professional learning and development and reclaim their sense of collaborative professionalism in a new era of austerity Britain. The account given here is about the new partnerships being created between and among academic colleagues, who are learning to work effectively with each other and their schooling colleagues on their collective professional learning and to build their collaborative sense of professionalism. The complexities of this task—of working in a professional learning community within Faculty in order to model and support a city-wide professional learning community with teacher partners, school communities, and civil servants in the local Authority—are framed in terms of knowledge-building for the improvement of educational provision for disadvantaged students in local schools and the university.     

教育叙事: 中小学英语教师专业发展有效途径

随着新课程的进一步修订和实施,对中小学英语教师专业发展提出了更高、更紧迫的要求。教育叙事是教师对其专业生活事件的反思性描述,它易于中小学英语教师操作,是其专业发展的有效途径。本文阐述了教育叙事的含义、特点、类型,以及中小学英语教师进行教育叙事的途径,以期给中小学英语教师更为具体的指导和帮助,使其不断地提高自己的专业素养。     

‘That great educational experiment’: the City of London Vacation Course in Education 1922–1938: a forgotten story in the history of teacher professional development

Each summer between 1922 and 1938, up to 500 elementary school teachers from across Britain, and some from overseas, joined together in London for a two-week residential vacation course. Organised by Evans’ Brothers Publishers and patronised by leading educationists, politicians and policy-makers, the City of London Vacation Course came to be regarded as an important annual educational institution and a cutting-edge exemplar of teacher professional development. In spite of this apparent fame, it appears to have been entirely overlooked in the history of teacher education. This paper seeks to recover the lost story of the City of London Vacation Course and documents its educational and professional focus and its social and cultural function. Locating it within a wider educational, economic and political climate, the paper also examines how the City of London Vacation Course somehow captured and embodied the promise of an emergent new professionalism for elementary teachers during that period.     

The missing voice of culturally relevant teachers in school restructuring

This article addresses the role of exemplary teachers of students of color in educational reform. Using an ethnographic study of two urban junior high schools in the beginning stages of restructuring, I describe threeculturally relevant teachers who create empowering educational experiences for low-achieving African American students. Despite their exemplary practice and their enthusiasm for educational change, thewisdom of practice of these teachers was largely discounted in the restructuring process. They were marginalized by ideological and political contexts which suppressed racial issues and advocacy for African American students and which supported a deficit model of low-achieving African American students. Restructuring fostered little examination of policies, practices, and beliefs which tended to marginalize African American students. This research suggests that professional dialogue and collaboration are mediated by teachers' ideologies and by relations of power in schools and communities. If exemplary teachers of children of color are to influence educational change, reformers need to legitimize their knowledge and sponsor their leadership. Also, reforms that benefit marginalized children of color may require the mobilization and participation of parents and communities of color as well as their teacher-advocates. Even though I'm not doing the Mentoring and Counseling Program any more, I can't reject them. They know I care about them. They know when you're not pretending. You don't turn off realness. Paulette I find them where they are. I say, “You've told stories. When you say, ‘The way I see it,’ that's point of view.” I just do it like that. When kids believe you think they can learn, they will. Samuel We have to challenge these students. When we don't give them an opportunity, we're taking something away from them. Helen     

Implementing Educational Policy Change: implications for teacher professionalism and professional empowerment

Utilising findings of a research study which examined the role of teachers in the process of educational policy change, this paper notes that teachers tend to cast themselves, and are cast by others, in a dependency situation as regards policy interpretation and implementation. In the interests of teacher professionalism and transformative educational change, this paper advocates an emancipatory approach to educational policy change. This approach is conceptualised in terms of three key dimensions: professional confidence; professional interpretation and professional consciousness. The paper makes suggestions for a professional development programme through which to promote teachers’ understandings and capacities in these areas and thereby enable them to take an active part in their own professional empowerment.     

Local enactment of the Swedish ‘advanced teacher reform’

This article focuses on a new form of governing that targets a selected group of teachers. Specifically, it analyses how the Swedish so-called advanced teacher reform is enacted at the local level and discusses its implications for teachers’ professionalism. The methodological approach enables a local analysis in a broader international policy context. Using characteristic elements from curriculum theory to analyse the relationship between different levels and elaborating on the linguistic turn of curriculum theory, three concepts are central in the analysis: enactment, linguistic criteria and professionalism. Empirically, the study draws on material from a two-year application process in a medium-sized municipality. The result demonstrates that the local enactment process is clearly influenced by transnational policy trends and that less allowance is made for teachers’ own experience-based knowledge in the second studied year. The linguistic analysis shows how the applicants using the ‘right concepts’ were selected to become ‘advanced teachers’. As complex and qualitative aspects disappeared from the agenda, this type of governing, with its standardized use of language, may reduce schools’ educational potential. Changes like this raise new questions about how schools can maintain and develop democratic and professional values whilst being exposed to new policy trends.     

推动中小学教师专业发展评鉴之考察:新专业主义的省思

教师专业发展是影响教育成效的关键之一,环顾世界主要国家都将提升教师专业发展视为重要的教育政策。为了确保教师的专业精神与专业知能,使教师们在数十年的专业生涯中,均能拥有最佳的专业服务质量及最高的成就感,也使学生能因教师的持续成长而获致最大的教育成效,使国家的总体竞争力能因拥有优秀的人才而不断提升,教师专业发展评鉴及绩效评鉴已经是难以抵挡的时代潮流,中小学教师必须准备迎接"教师评鉴时代"的来临。本文运用文献分析、历史研究、理论分析与哲学思考等方法,省思中小学教师评鉴之推动过程与现状,首先借鉴英国教师新专业主义的发展及其七项原则,逐一检视目前台湾教师专业发展评鉴的措施,考察其适当性与有待加强处,务期将"教师专业发展评鉴"纳入法令之际,提供研究成果给决策机关作为全面推动之参考。     

Building citizenship in fragmented societies: The challenges of deracialising and integrating schools in post-Apartheid South Africa

Soon after the collapse of Apartheid, the new government in South Africa set about restructuring the educational system, which was previously segregated by race, class and language. This paper argues that the deracialisation and integration of schools in South Africa has been difficult to achieve and as a process, uneven in different parts of the country and in types of schools.     

Exploring UK secondary teachers' professional values: an overview of the literature since 2000

Background:?Professional commitment from teachers requires more than contractual compliance as personal and professional values are integral to teaching practice. Secondary school teachers are expected to act as role models and demonstrate positive attributes and attitudes in an evolving educational context. Little is known about how they understand or interpret their own values, or realise the shared values that lie at the heart of a school community.

Purpose:?The purpose of this review is to summarise the literature relating to values that teachers hold. The review is concerned with theoretical and empirical studies in which such values are considered, and also any tensions identified between the personal values of teachers and organisational values of the schools reflected in professional practice. This scoping exercise is part of two-year funded empirical research carried out by the authors in five secondary schools in England, using data from individuals, groups and schools on the personal values of teachers and head teachers. This research explored whether these values are congruent with the organisational values schools seek to establish.

Design and methods:?An extensive literature review was undertaken relating to the values held by secondary school professionals. The search was restricted to more recent works (i.e. the year 2000 onwards), and was mainly UK and secondary education focused. The search was conducted using the educational database, Education Indexes on Dialog, and the Electronic Journal Service which is a database covering wider disciplines. To reach harder-to-find research reports, additional strategies were adopted including hand searching of key journals and reference to existing publication lists. The review generated over 1000 published references that were then screened to determine whether publications were based on empirical research conducted in schools, and/or helped a deeper theoretical understanding about the meaning of values.

Conclusion:?The review highlights the integral part values continue to play in education. This article presents a framework of understanding derived from the literary contexts in which values are discussed. There is little empirical data to support current understanding about the values that secondary teachers hold, and how these fit with the organisational values of the schools in which they work. Studies in the context of values and professionalism stress the need for dialogue and reflection so that ‘implicit’ values that teachers hold become explicit, and refined through practice.     

Tablet use in primary education: Adoption hurdles and attitude determinants

In the Netherlands, six primary schools recently participated in a pilot program, creating an educational environment in which children use a tablet PC. In these six schools, two studies are conducted. The first study highlights the process by which primary schools adopted tablet PCs by means of interviews based on diffusion of innovation theory. All stages are discussed: Knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. Two tablet systems are considered: closed and open systems. In the second study, a questionnaire was administered among primary school children in the pilot schools. Factors that affected the general attitude towards tablet PCs are perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, interest in the task and independence. Social influence and prior experience with tablets did not affect the overall attitude. The results of both studies provide several recommendations on how tablet PCs can contribute to educational improvements.     

Educational Collaboration in the Restructuring of Schools

The need for improved collaboration among educators in the schools has been repeatedly documented in both first wave (legislated learning) and second wave (empowerment/school restructuring) education reform movements. This article describes the role of educational collaboration as one important key to professional sharing of best practices in the restructuring of schools. Critical issues and practical strategies for developing and implementing this shared planning, decision-making, and problem-solving process are discussed. The importance of operationally defining educational collaboration as it is to be implemented in each individual school is emphasized. issues and strategies for developing school norms that support educational collaboration, including redefining and clarifying professional roles, systematic staff training and support, developing organizational structures for collaboration, and providing professionals with adequate time for collaboration, are reviewed and critiqued.