Session Information
19 SES 13, The Development of the Postmodern Professional (Part 2)
Symposium
Contribution
Andy Hargreaves (Hargreaves 2000) identifies four ages of professionalism, the pre professional, the age of autonomy, the collegial and the post professional age or postmodern. The first is one in which students were treated as collective, stratified groups and practices in which traditional repetitive pedagogies dominated and where one learnt from one’s experience of it. The second, the age of autonomy was one where the profession was established and pedagogic theories took hold. Teacher professionality was at its height and government took little interest in the curriculum or assessment procedures. The third age of collegiality followed the development of pedagogy and its support, in England by locally interested teacher groups and Local Authorities who provided a professional career ladder for classroom teachers to become pedagogic and curriculum advisors and local inspectors. At the same time schools began to become more managerial drawing together teachers in each school to develop school policies with teachers being encouraged to work together on developing curriculum and pedagogy. The period from 1990, to the present day, in England and developing across Europe, has been characterised as a drastic loss of autonomy and professional collegiality has been replaced with school managerial team work, in many cases to implement government directed centrally devised and controlled policies, practice and performance. Previous ‘professional’ dispositions such as truthfulness, mutual respect, authenticity, courage and compassion were threatened by the values of the market place (Nixon 2005) which have placed educational institutions in competition with one another and encouraged them to continually improve their market position in published league tables of performance.
However, the post modern professional is now more diverse taking on board some of the characteristics of past ages and incorporating a performative professional role. Firstly, there is a restricted, bureau-professional form of professionalism in which teachers are expected to function as experts in their own classrooms but to "work within bureaucratic frameworks laid down by their local authorities and administered by their head teachers” (Reeves 2005); a managerial form of professionalism in which teachers are constructed as closely supervised, rule following operatives; and a new professionalism based on notions of collaboration, knowledge sharing and problem solving in which teacher professionals see themselves as part of professional leaning communities (PLP). This last type of professional is expected to expand capacity, act innovatively, appreciate being valued, enjoy collective well being, assist aspirations and learn how to learn (Webb and Vulliamy 2009). New managerial Teacher identities have been constructed that focus on institutional change and effectiveness, which contrasts with democratic professional aspirations (Clarke 2004).
However, teachers are not passive in these processes of ethical drift, just as they are not simply inert victims of policy shifts more generally. They are active ethical agents who continually have to negotiate the dilemmas of contemporary educational practice, and who have to reconcile conflicting ethical commitments such as commitments to inter-institutional collegiality and the survival of the particular institution in which they work (Gerwirtz, Cribb et al. 2006).
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