Session Information
23 SES 06 A, Teacher’s Work and Professionalism
Paper Session
Contribution
Globally, during the last thirty years, an ‘economization of education policy’ (Lingard 2009, 81) has evolved via neo-liberal policy frameworks that privilege theories of ‘human capital’ production (Ball 2006), performativity (Lyotard 1984), and standardised testing. Increasingly, teaching has become state business and educational ‘outputs’ have become measurements of national competitive advantage. According to Lingard (2010):
Numbers, categories, data, statistics are central to this technology, are central to achieving cybernetic input-output equations demanded by the contemporary neo-liberal state (17).
Such a technocratic business model is likely to conflict with the emotional labour (Hochschild 1983; Prosser 2006) inherent in teachers’ work, and, as noted by Ball (2006), leads to ‘a struggle over the teacher’s soul’ (145). Constrained by state demands to conform to macro-policies of measurement and accountability, the professional identity of the individual teacher is under threat. A teacher’s identity may be construed as being built upon values and beliefs that engender repertoires of professional practices. Watson (2006) contends that identity ‘is about … ways of being for self and others’ (509) and ‘it is the teaching self one is enabled to do in a given situation, which, when done successfully, is the teaching self in which one feels natural’ (510). Within mainstream schooling sectors, it seems that most teachers have little choice but to comply with systemic controls over ‘their teaching selves’ as made evident in pedagogy and curriculum choices. However, research situated within alternative and democratic schools reveals a different picture.
The data for this paper are drawn from a project which investigates those types of alternative schools that seek to cater to the needs of young people who are unlikely to return to the mainstream sector for philosophical reasons and/or negative experiences, these may include bullying, conflicts with authority, academic ‘failure’ and a host of life circumstances that impede ‘success’ at school. Such alternative sites concentrate on the school environment, curricula and pedagogy, rather than addressing a perceived student deficit. Mostly, the existence of these schools rests upon private and/or charitable funding and resourcing and thus their existence is often tenuous. Overall, this research is concerned with investigating the following issues: funding; student perspectives; schooling environment; curriculum and pedagogy; and staffing. The education of young people is a political issue and therefore analyses of teachers’ work must be situated within the current neo-liberal agendas (Apple 2006) driving educational policies. In this paper, we explore the connections between this policy context and decisions by some teachersto move from the mainstream schools into alternative education sites despite tenuous employment conditions and often lower salaries.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Apple, M. 2006. Educating the ‘right’ way. 2nd ed. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Ball, S. 2006. Education, policy and social class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball. Abingdon & NY: Routledge. Connelly, M. and J. Clandinen. 2006. Narrative inquiry. In Handbook of complementary methods in education research, eds. J. Green, G. Camilli and P. Elmore, 477-488. New Jersey: Erlbaum. Fraser, H. 2004. Doing narrative research: Analysing personal stories line by line. In Qualitative Social Work, 3 (2), 179-201. Gubrium, J. and J. Holstein. 1997. The new language of qualitative method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hochschild, A. 1983. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lingard, R. 2010. Radford Memorial Lecture, Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), Melbourne, Australia. 28 November - 2 December 2010. Lingard, R. 2009. Pedagogozing teacher professional identities. In Changing Teacher Professionalism: International trends, challenges and ways forward, eds. S. Gerwirtz, P. Mahony, I. Hextall and A. Cribb, 81-93. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Lyotard, J. 1984. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press. Prosser, B. 2006. Emotion, identity, imagery and hope as resources for teachers' work. Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), Adelaide, Australia. 27-30 November 2006. Watson, C. 2006. Narratives of practice and the construction of identity in teaching. In Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 12 (5), 509-526.
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