La professionnalisation des enseignants

How can you have experts from over 15 different countries working together on a theme, the professionalisation of teachers, when one of the terms, and the root word ‐‐ profession ‐‐ does not have the same meaning everywhere? Such was the difficulty facing this third ATEE thematic seminar that we had proposed. The original presentation text below allowed us to resolve the difficulty, by organising the experts’ work around the different meanings of the word professionalisation. Four meanings were picked out according to whether the word professionalisation applied:...(i) to the individual, who masters the activity better and better and thus meets the norms of professionalism; (it) to the group of individuals who, carrying out the same activity, improve their status by obtaining a monopoly over it; (iii) to the knowledge put into practice which is the most closely tied to practice and the most effective; (iv) to the training, orientated more towards the activity in terms of its content as well as its teacher trainers, some of whom are practitioners of the given activity. To clarify the different mechanisms at work in each case, we had recourse to pedagogy, history, sociology, and anthropology. These conceptual distinctions were proposed to help in the writing of 12 national case studies, to solicit four keynote papers and to determine the themes of the workshops.