Research Question:

What changes pertaining to teacher professional identity occurred in the thinking of Canadian teacher-participants as a result of a 2-week Study Abroad experience in Finland?

General Description and Objectives:

          This paper describes a qualitative study that examined the continuing professional development (CPD) of a group of Canadian teachers around their professional identity. More specifically, it describes how a 2-week Study Abroad experience in Finland influenced the thinking of a group of teachers from the province of Saskatchewan. Teacher professional identity was the study’s main focus, comparing their work experience in Saskatchewan schools and their status within Canadian society with perceptions garnered from Finnish lecturers, teachers, and school observations about teacher work life and teacher status.

            In Saskatchewan and across Canada, the teaching profession has decreased in status in recent years, coinciding with the implementation of neoliberal economic policy (Westheimer, 2015). Neoliberalism replaced Keynesian economic policy in the U.S. during the 1980s (Orlowski, 2014). Although appearing relatively late in the Saskatchewan context, neoliberal economic policy has become firmly entrenched for the past decade (Orlowski, 2015). Finland was chosen for comparative purposes because it is known to have a strong public education system (Simola, 2015; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009). As well, teaching is a desirable profession in Finland, on par with medicine and law (Sahlberg, 2011). At the time of the study, neoliberalism had had very little influence on the Finnish school system.

            It is ironic that the world’s attention became focused on Finland’s school system because of the country’s top rankings on the PISA scores (Simola, 2015; Niemi, Toom, & Kallioniemi, 2012). Finland, perhaps more than any other OECD country, considers standardized testing to be anathema to best assessment practices (Sahlberg, 2011). Saskatchewan, on the other hand, has recently attempted to become the province that utilizes standardized testing the most (Spooner & Orlowski, 2013).

            The main objective for the course was to offer the Saskatchewan teachers an opportunity to gain knowledge in a different situational context that would shape their professional identity as teachers in a positive manner. The main objective of the study, however, was to determine to what extent transformative learning had taken place regarding the categories under study.     

  Theoretical Framework:          

            The study abroad course was to provide ample opportunity for the teacher-participants to critically reflect upon the related concepts of teacher professionalism and teacher identity. American philosopher of education John Dewey (1938) maintained that genuine critical reflection requires a state of perplexity to challenge a learner’s current belief. He believed that a true educable experience often involves engaging learners in disorienting situations. (In these terms, learning about teacher professionalism in far away Finland, a country that none of the participants had visited before, was the perfect context for the Saskatchewan teacher-participants.) According to Taylor (2008), “critical reflection seems to be a developmental process rooted in experience” (p. 11). All of the teacher-participants had between six and 39 years of teaching experience in Saskatchewan public schools. This past experience, coupled with the study abroad course in Finland, provided the necessary requirements for which critical reflection could lead to transformation.

          The theoretical framework for the study utilized Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory (1991, 1998, 2000). Three steps in particular were addressed: the learner recognizing that discontentment is connected to the transformative process; increased competence and self-confidence resulting from the transformative process; and a reintegration into one’s work life influenced by the new perspective. Four categories were analyzed using this framework: how the participants perceived teacher status in both contexts; curricular reform and implementation; student assessment and teacher accountability; and the role of teacher unions in supporting teacher professionalism.

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