Teachers’ Professional Lives New Prospects Series General Editors: Professor Ivor Goodson. Faculty of Education. University of Western Ontario. Canada and Professor Andy Hargreaves. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Canada. 1 Rethinking Instructional Supervision: Notes of its Language and Culture Duncan Waite 2 Schooling, Welfare and Parental Responsibility Michael Wyness 3 Teachers’ Professional Lives Edited by Ivor F.Goodson and Andy Hargreaves New Prospects Series 3 Teachers’ Professional Lives Edited by Ivor F.Goodson and Andy Hargreaves Falmer Press (A member of the Taylor & Francis Group) London • Washington, D.C. UK Falmer Press, 1 Gunpowder Square, London, EC4A 3DE USA Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 © I.F.Goodson and A.Hargreaves, 1996 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec- tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permis- sion in writing from the Publisher. First published in 1996 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on request ISBN 0-203-45398-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-76222-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 7507 0513 2 cased ISBN 0 7507 0514 0 paper Jacket design by Caroline Archer Contents Editorial Preface Ivor Goodson and Andy Hargreaves vii 1 Teachers’ Professional Lives: Aspirations and Actualities 1 Andy Hargreaves and Ivor Goodson 2 Teachers’ Work, Restructuring and Postfordism: Constructing the New ‘Professionalism’ 28 Susan L.Robertson 3 Teacher Professionalism and Curriculum Control 56 Gill Helsby and Gary McCulloch 4 Are Professional Teachers a Good Thing? 75 Tomas Englund 5 Historical Notes on the Barriers to the Professionalization of American Teachers: The Influence of Markets and Patriarchy 88 Andrew Gitlin and David F.Labaree 6 Using Drawings to Interrogate Professional Identity and the Popular Culture of Teaching 109 Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell 7 Teacher Professionalism in Local School Contexts 127 Joan E.Talbert and Milbrey W.McLaughlin 8 Student Teachers’ Lay Theories: Implications for Professional Development 154 Ciaran Sugrue 9 Women as Teachers: Teachers as Women 178 Miriam Ben-Peretz 10 Knowledge, Teacher Development and Change 187 Marvin F.Wideen, Jolie A.Mayer-Smith and Barbara J.Moon v Contents 11 Development and Disenchantment in the Professional Lives of Headteachers 205 Christopher Day and Aysen Bakiog∧lu Notes on Contributors 228 Index 232 vi Editorial Preface Setting professional standards and redefining what it means to be professional in teaching are at the forefront of educational reform. Universities and unions, governments and business all have aspirations to raise the professional status of teaching and establish professional standards for their work. Professional development and training are experiencing sweeping changes, professional standards are being created, self-regulating, professional bodies for teachers are being set up. Yet while the aspirations for greater professionalism in teaching are admirable, what such professionalism might mean is often vague, unclear or contested. Moreover, what teachers themselves think about professionalism or what they experience under its name are addressed too rarely. This international book examines just what’s behind the push for professionalism. A key opening chapter sets out the field and distinguishes between six different models of meanings of professionalism. With others, it disentangles altruistic visions of professionalism from ones that are nakedly self-serving, or that disguise and excuse the imposition of even greater bureaucratic control. Other chapters portray what teacher professionalism and teachers’ professional lives look like in practice, in the daily working lives of teachers themselves. The movement for teacher professionalism, professional standards and professional self-regulation has become a bandwagon for academic and bureaucratic cheer-leaders who presume to know what is best for teachers. This timely book takes discussion off the bandwagon and lodges it firmly within the working lives and realities of teachers themselves. The chapters in this book have all been written specially for it. They come from experienced researchers across the world in North America, England, Australia, Israel and Scandinavia, who have been stimulated by our own professional network of inquiry and dialogue that has helped push our thinking in international and interdisciplinary ways on what teacher professionalism is, what it means, and whether it is always a good thing. Building collaborative communities of critical colleagues is as difficult in educational research as it is in schoolteaching, and we are grateful for the various funding bodies who have believed in the value of professional dialogue, and supported our efforts to interact electronically and in person in pursuit of greater knowledge and understanding of these important challenges that confront teaching and education. vii Editorial Preface Among the groups and individuals we would like to thank for supporting our network, Professional Actions and Cultures of Teaching (PACT), and this book which has sprung from it are our financial supporters: the Ontario Public School Teachers’ Federation of Canada who provided the seed funding for our first meeting in San Francisco; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada who have funded the secretariat for the International and Canadian networks; and several bodies in England who financed PACT members to organize and present at an important national conference on teacher education reform. Supporters for this event included the Roehampton Institute, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the National Association of Headteachers, the Association of University Teachers and the Times Educational Supplement. The production of this book would not have been possible without the brilliant organizational skills and editorial attentiveness of Alicia Fernandez, PACT’s Administrator. Bob Macmillan, Alicia’s predecessor, was vital in making PACT an effective collaborative force in its early days. Leo Santos and Odilla Van Delinder have provided their usual invaluable secretarial assistance in making elegant tableaux of the chaotic fragments which we academics put before them. Many thanks to all of you. We also would like to thank Malcolm Clarkson at Falmer Press for his financial and intellectual support of the conference at Spencer Hall, London Ontario at which many of these papers were first presented. We would also like to thank Odilla Van Delinder for her substantial help in organizing this conference and the workers and management at Spencer Hall for their splendid, nay lavish, hospitality. We believe that effective professional collaboration among teachers works best when it is directed by members of the professional community themselves, within facilitating structures and on the basis of enabling resources that others who believe in their vision, and trust them to bring it to fruition, are prepared to risk making available. Our own professional community, embodied in PACT, has been built on a similarly risky vision. Our colleagues in PACT and external supporters of it deserve our most heartfelt gratitude for committing to it with us. What we advocate for others, we should try and practise ourselves. In this sense, PACT has represented our own joyful struggle to establish and develop the kind of postmodern professional community we would like to see more educators seeking for themselves. Teachers’ Professional Lives is PACT’s first concrete product; the first published ‘fruit’ of its labour. We hope our readers will find much of value in it to inform all our individual searches and collective struggles for better professional lives. Ivor Goodson Andy Hargreaves viii Chapter 1 Teachers’ Professional Lives: Aspirations and Actualities Andy Hargreaves and Ivor Goodson Introduction The struggle of teachers for professional recognition and for the associated working conditions and rewards that might bring it about has a long and chequered history. More pay, higher status, greater autonomy, increased self-regulation and improved standards of training—these recurrent themes have underscored the individual and collective struggles of teachers for many decades. Yet, notwithstanding a few historical and geographical exceptions such as the substantial salaries achieved by Canadian teachers in the 1970s, the high degree of autonomy over curriculum development and decision-making enjoyed by British teachers in the 1960s and early 1970s (Grace, 1987) and the conversion of teaching to an all-graduate profession during the same period almost everywhere, the project of professionalization has been steadfastly resisted by cost-conscious, and control-centred governments and bureaucracies. Collectively and individually, teachers themselves have also often seemed ambivalent about whether their identity is that of professionals or cultural workers. They have therefore been uncertain and inconsistent about whether they should pursue middle class status in ‘acceptable professional’ ways, or use the collective strategies of union bargaining to defend their interests (Ginsburg et al., 1980; Carlson, 1992; Bascia, 1994). For these reasons and others, teacher professionalization has been a historically precarious project: resisted by governments, bureaucracies and business interests without, and undermined by ambiguities of loyalty, strategy and identity within. Recent years have seen an intriguing twist in this familiar tale, however. Across many parts of the world, teacher professionalization is now being sponsored with exceptional vigour by governments, bureaucracies and big business. There seems to be an enormous interest, politically and administratively in identifying, codifying and applying professional standards of practice to the teaching force. A National Board of Professional Teaching Standards has been established in the United States, which teachers can choose to join by having their knowledge and skills inspected and certified by their peers. In England and Wales, the creation of a General Teaching Council has been proclaimed as a policy priority by the opposition Labour Party. In 1