Session Information
23 SES 03 C, Policy Reforms and Teachers’ Work (Part 2): 1030/460/2211
Paper Session continued from 23 SES 02 C
Contribution
Education systems all over the world have experienced many changes in recent years. Education ‘reforms’ have focused on especially two main areas. The first of these is the reproduction of labour power linked to developments in the global economy and the second one is defining education as a new valorization area for capital accumulation. With the restructuring process experienced in educational services depending on these change dynamics, teaching has gone through many transformations. The teachers who are the most important actors of education field are expected to keep pace with the change process and to be even active agents of it. In this period, discussions about the “quality” of the teachers who are in charge of social reproduction of labor power and bringing up citizens have been increasing, as well.
A discourse has been created about teachers are being “professionalized” with the new reforms. But this kind of professionalism was different from the traditional one that is based on the traits such as high level of systematic knowledge gained through education, having a central professional organization and autonomy in the execution of the profession (see Barber, 1963; Freidson, 1988; Hughes, 1963). For that reason it is called “new professionalism” that has features such as standardization in practice and measurable performance (see Hargreaves, 1994; Robertson, 1996). Defining professionalism, as Lawn (1996) noted, is closely related with the political struggles in order to position teaching in the system of new social relationships. Contrary to the rhetoric of the reforms about professionalizing teachers being central to improving the quality of education and teaching, the studies show that these reforms made them deskilled, intensified and alienated within the bureaucratic structure of the school system (Apple, 1986; Ozga and Lawn, 1988; Gewirtz, 1997 etc.). Within the framework of this labor process approach, education is seen as a work, teachers are as workers and schools are as workplaces, and the changes in the profession has been called proletarianization as a result of the commodification of education (Smyth, 2001; Carter and Stevenson, 2012; Reid, 2003).
This study aims to analyze the changes in teachers' work in England and Turkey comparatively in association with the historical change process based on their own experiences. The traditional features of the country/region, its constitutional order, and the organization level of the society can all impact the change process. Education is an arena where struggles and conflicts are experienced between different social groups about how the education policies and the curriculum are shaped, how ‘capacity for social practice’ is developed, as Connell (1995) stated. For that reason, the change process in teacher’s work will be analyzed based on the teachers’ narratives relating to their work experiences, the meanings they attribute to education and their work, their comprehensions relating to their roles together with the changing labour process of teaching. In this context, the change process will be analyzed in a framework for understanding and explaining how teachers live the change in their work, how they give meaning to this process, how they get involved in, not only as the effects that the structural conditions create on teacher’s work. In this way, a link can be established between structure and agency to reveal the changes in teachers' work that have similar aspects due to global changes but differentiate according to the local dynamics. Understanding this difference is critical. Neoliberal globalization is impacting on education systems across the world. However, it unfolds in quite distinctive ways in different contexts and comparative studies are important in helping to understand the nuances of how reforms develop in particular ways in particular contexts.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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