Session Information
23 SES 07 C, Theorizing Globally Distributed Educational Work
Symposium
Contribution
This paper introduces the symposium and its aim of reconceptualising teaching and the teaching occupation as a politics of work. It illustrates our critical perspective on core social forms, like ‘urban education’, using debates about teacher professionalism. These debates reveal the way socially constructed boundaries are naturalised in education because of their historical anchoring and research investment in compulsory schooling, and the way globalised neo-liberal reforms disrupt these practices of teacher professionalism and also research in this field. I track this field’s stale debate about de-and re-professionalisation into its functionalist turn towards ‘teacher development’ perspectives that converge with managerial reforms. I then elaborate our alternative perspective, locating it in the boundary zone between educational and sociological theories of professions, which increasingly recognise flexible boundaries and relational theories of space, place and movement. Reviewing these theoretical developments provides a set of concepts for restating the problem of teacher professionalism as a politics of work. I illustrate our key concepts – politics of ‘we’, ‘occupational boundary work’, and ‘educational work’ as professional project – with reference to our collaborative global ethnography of human service work (teaching, nursing & social work) and the papers in this symposium.
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