Constructing Teacher Professionalism between Organizational Decision-making and Work-life Autonomy : After-work from European Research on Professional Knowledge under Restructuring

• A basis for this paper is an international comparative study on Professional Knowledge under Restructuring, carried out with the support of the European Commission. The research was carried out by researchers from seven European countries, It is our ambition to do some necessary after-work by reflecting on this research – the process of work as well as the outcomes. However, from a historical perspective, the “professionalism” of teachers is a new phenomenon. While early studies more directly concerned themselves with understanding the very authority of professionals as a social fact, with the consequence that teachers was either excluded, e.g. in the classical work of Parsons, 1939, or met with skeptical attitudes, e.g. by Wilensky (1964) and Etzioni (1964) as well as Lortie (1975), the literature on professions and professionalism now seems generally more “normative” in its orientations. As the inflation of the literature on professionals and professionalism has increased dramatically since the 1980s and early 1990s, we will argue that this normative shift not only means a shift in orientation, but also in the rationalities and functions of the talk of professionalism itself. At this point in time, it is more obvious than ever that the very talk of professionalism embrace the ambition to re/shape its very nature, e.g. what the professional lives of teachers’ means and how it should be lived. The shift from representation to performativity is in academic literature actualized and displayed in many different ways. Important for this study is, on the one hand, the ways in which it has meant a shift in the understanding of educational policy, where concepts such as “performativity” (Ball, 2003) and “governmentality” has become important for new understandings on the (re)structuring of educational systems worldwide (Lindblad and Popkewitz, 2004), and, on the other hand, a shift in the elaborative understandings of professionalism has opened up for an interest of daily work and life of teacher and the realities they face and shape. The more dynamic aspects of the life and work of the professionalism of teachers are put to the fore in these, mostly, post-empiricist and post-structuralist, scholarly work is in the theoretical focus of this paper. We share the epistemological insights of these traditions, and hold the thesis that significant differences in the ways in which teachers experience and live their professional lives make sense on bases of the differences by which they experience and make sense of their own – as well as policy-makers – technologies for handling, stimulating and controlling learning activities inside and outside classrooms (cf Fournier, 1999; Foss Lindblad & Lindblad 2009). Thus, this inclines an epistemological twist, leading us toward a more generative understanding of professional knowledge and the ways it is narrated and important for educational practices.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

professions

international comparisons

teaching

educational policy

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