Session Information
23 SES 08 C, Teacher's work, Training and Professionalism (Part 2)
Paper Session. Continued from 23 SES 07 C.
Time:
2009-09-30
08:30-10:00
Room:
HG, HS 16
Chair:
Ingolfur Asgeir Johannesson
Contribution
In ‘Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality’, EU stressed the role of universities in relation to lifelong learning, a role that entail a need for widening access to universities, particularly for those not coming through the traditional direct route of upper secondary education. As teachers play a significant role in the quality of the lifelong learning as well as in motivating future generations to take part in lifelong learning, education and training for teachers becomes important; not only in relation to initial teacher education, but also in relation to a continuous development of knowledge and skills.
This paper represents the first stage of a larger comparative project intended to examine and compare educational workers’ (i.e. professionals involved in teaching in the class room) participation in higher education in England and Denmark, their access and interest. In particular, the paper relates participation and engagement to national and international educational policies and frames this work within an examination of the social background of the professional groups. The key research questions at this stage of the work are methodological and can be summed up by the overarching question, “How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand levels of engagement of educational workers in Higher Education”?
The paper reports the results of our review of current policies and our efforts to identify the structural relations within the educational professional fields in each country. To do so we are developing a theoretical model using the relational analytical approach advocated by Bourdieu. As such, our work is an early stage attempt at operationalising Bourdieu’s observations regarding the dynamics of field. This seems to us to provide an important conceptual approach to understanding the habitus of educational workers in the context of the dynamics of a fast changing policy arena and the complexities of the backgrounds of individuals working in the educational field. The model attempts to build in the reflexivity that Bourdieu demands for a ‘science’ that is not weakened by over-emphasis on either the objective structural relations or the subjective phenomenology of experience.
Thus, the paper presents a preliminary contextual analysis of the factors that enable an understanding of engagement or lack of engagement in higher level learning among school-based education workers in the two EU countries and is related to a larger research project that explores habitus (both individual and collective) among these groups of education workers.
Method
Though the project at a later stage will also include field research, the results presented in this paper will solely be based on existing data sources. Information on the structures at national level will be based on analyses of documents describing the educational systems in the two countries involved (e.g. governmental and regional/local documents) as well as available statistics. This will be supplemented with reviews of EU and national policy papers to allow the analysis to include not only current but also intended education pathways for educational workers. In addition, the methodology will include reviews of existing studies and data on structural relations relevant for engagement in higher education among educational workers, including their social backgrounds.
Expected Outcomes
The expected outcome in the paper to be presented is a preliminary understanding of the structural relations that affect participation in post-graduate higher education among educational workers, aimed at adding to the development of a theoretical model on participation and engagement in higher education among these professions. The presentation of the paper will also enable us to potentially identify, via colleagues, other EU partner states that will add to our comparative study
References
Bourdieu, P. (1992) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, J.D. (1992) An Invitation to reflexive sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press Bourdieu, P. (2001) Practical Reason, Cambridge: Polity Press European Commission (2001) Making a European Area of Lifelong Learning a Reality (COM(2001)678 final) European Commission (2007) Improving the Quality of Teacher Education (COM(2007)0392)
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