Session Information
23 SES 06 A, Teacher’s Work and Professionalism
Paper Session
Contribution
All over the World, and particularly in Europe, teachers are facing new challenges and obligations predisposing them to, apparently, unavoidable changes. There are various contributing factors: restructuring of their academic careers, generalized performance evaluations, recommendations for better student's learning outcomes and the use of new information and communication technologies, as well as an increase in the retirement age.
The rise of new generations within the school system is being referred more often in the literature (Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006) – namely, generation X or baby-boomers and generation Y born within the digital and social-network society – which would differ on their attitudes toward teaching and affiliations (Rayou & van Zanten, 2004; Cherubini, 2009).
The situation is rooted in both substantial cultural changes – which include globalisation and the infiltration of information and communication technologies into everyday life -, in which the new generation has already developed, and in education policies with focus on a knowledge and efficiency society that makes older teachers feel unvalued and out of place.
The focus of this paper is the new teachers' scenario in European schools, characterised by the presence of older teachers and younger teachers which the literature has identified as a real new generation with very different methods of doing and thinking about teaching/learning. Nowadays, research has been developed on the impact of recent educational policies on veteran teachers (the baby boomer generation) and on their characteristics (e.g. Day & Gu, 2009) and on the arrival in schools of a new generation of teachers (the millennial generation) who are quite different from the generation that preceded them (e.g. Rayou & Van Zanten, 2004). According to Cherubini (2009) new teachers represent a post-modern approach and older teachers represent the modern approach.
Taking the European educational challenges, will be important to analyse the risks and opportunities that this situation involves, namely through the study of the relationships that the different generations will establish among each other. Knowing how teachers from different generations are coping with the new challenges imposed by the educational policies is a first step in the study of that topic.
The goal of the study we are going to address here has been the identification of similarities and differences among the experiences of teachers from different generations, as they face the new challenges imposed by their academic activities.
The theoretical framework which has guided us is Lopes' (2009) concept of the construction of a teacher's professional identity, which takes the notion of construction of a professional identity as a two-way transaction (Dubar, 1997) and considers the construction of the identity of teachers as an ecological matter; namely, a process regarding the various levels of the ecological system: individual, interpersonal, organizational and societal. The concept of generation is defined as the set of similarities and differences among people who were born and raised in the same time period (Edmunds & Turner, 2002) and is one of the 5 waves of change identified by Hargreaves and Goodson (2006) when they argue that educational administration systematically neglects the longitudinal, historical and political aspects of change.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bolívar, A. (2006). La Identidad professional del profesorado de secundaria: crisis y reconstrucción. Málaga: Ediciones Aljibe. Cherubini, L. (2009). Reconciling the tensions of new teachers’ socialisation into school culture: a review of the research. Issues in Educational Research, 19(2), 83-99. Day, C. (2004). A paixão pelo ensino. Porto: Porto Editora Dubar , C. (1997). A socialização – Construção das identidades sociais e profissionais. Porto: Porto Editora. Edmunds, J., & Turner, B. (2002). Generations, culture and society. Buckingham, United Kingdom: Open University Press. Estrela, A. (1994). Teoria e prática de observação de classes – uma estratégia de formação de professores. Porto: Porto Editora. Hargreaves, A., & Goodson, I. (2006). Educational Change Over Time? The Sustainability and Nonsustainability of Three Decades of Secondary School Change and Continuity. Educational Administration Quarterly, 42(1) 3-41. Huberman, M. (1989). La vie des enseignants. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestle. Rayou, P., & Van Zanten, A. (2004). Enquête sur les nouveaux enseignants – changeront-ils l’école ?. Paris: Bayard. Day, C., & Gu, Q. (2009). Veteran teachers : commitment, resilience and quality retention. Teachers and Teaching – Theory and Practice, 15(4), 441-457. Lopes, A. (2009). Teachers as professionals and teachers’ identity construction as an ecological construct: An agenda for research and training drawing upon a biographical research process. European Educational Research Journal, 8(3), 461-475. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2009.8.3.461.
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