Session Information
17 SES 01, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
The need of educating for freedom and in freedom has been a recurrent theme in educational discourse. After the Second World War especially, the concept has moved to the heart of western self-understanding. When understood as the ability to make autonomous decisions, freedom plays a crucial role in the professional self-image of teachers too. Philip Gardner has pointed out that for teachers who started their career in the interwar period, the relative autonomy of their function was an important aspect of their profession: “Distanced from, and effectively untroubled by, the parents of the children whom they taught, elementary teachers maintained their classroom strongholds where the only constraints on practice might come from an overbearing head teacher or from the intrusion of the occasional inspector.”(Gardner 1999) This quote shows that the perception of autonomy is based on the absence of constraints. When a teacher, his or her colleagues, the school board and the parents all share a similar set of values, the teacher’s autonomy remains untested and the constraints on his freedom invisible. Only when the teacher chooses a contested path, the limits of his or her freedom come into view.
In Belgium, like in many other western countries, the 1960s and 1970s were characterised by intense discussions about freedom, democracy, creativity and self-actualization. Many young students, including aspiring teachers, blamed the school system for (re)producing conformism and social inequality. However, since the catholic network retained a dominant position over Belgian education (especially elementary education), most of these critical young teachers had to start their career in a traditional environment. Some of them started teaching with the conscious aim of changing the system from within. Others, less ambitiously, tried to implement at least some new educational practices and ideas in their teaching. Both of them were confronted with a system that allowed only a minimum of change. Non-conforming teachers being a small minority in confessional schools, their alternative ways of teaching, political views or even haircut was apt to offend colleagues, school principals or parents. Especially during the 1960s and early 1970s, their ideals and practices could lead to confrontations. But of course, not every difference of opinion led to conflict. Some practices were left to the discretion of the teacher, while others led to intervention from ‘outside’. We want to find out where the limits lay: when, and for what reasons exactly, did those teachers ran into trouble, and how did they react? What level of conformity was needed to keep on functioning in the system? Which set of tactics did they use to circumvent restrictions? How did they try to convince colleagues of their approach? How did they form alliances within the school? But also: which values did they share with the system? How did they find enough common ground to maintain a professional relationship? Since there are virtually no written sources that deal with this sort of experiences, we will conduct a series of interviews with (ex-)teachers to answer our research questions.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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