Lifelong Learning for Teachers Teaching Is Often

Lifelong Learning for Teachers

Teaching is often described as one of the noblest of all professions. What is less often acknowledged is how difficult a profession it is. Part of this difficulty arises from the fact that the standards by which teachers are judged shift from year to year. These standards, while purporting to arise from concern for providing the nation's children with the best possible education, are in fact often more reflective of political changes in concept about pedagogy. In the scenery of shifting political winds and the true complexity about what constitutes the most effective ways of teaching, it is difficult for teachers to make the most informed decisions about how to engage in lifelong learning activities that will truly benefit their students as well as helping them pursue their own personal career goals. This paper examines some of the key issues in this complex topic.

Shain has written some of the most trenchant analysis of this topic, noting that the ways in which teachers are judged, and the larger issue of the ways in which the idea of professionalism within the teaching sector is defined to begin with, are affected by politics and overall shifts in society that reflect evolving ideas about the relative importance and responsibility of the state and private interests:

This analysis reveals that 'public sector' notions of teacher professionalism committed to notions of service to community and teacher autonomy are challenged by market liberal reform committed to privatisation and deregulation in ways that suggest deprofessionalisation proceeds alongside reprofessionalisation as part of an ongoing politics of knowledge, power and social organisation. Seddon encourages researchers to consider the character and parameters of preferred reprofessionalisations that might be pursued through contemporary processes of educational change. (Shain, n.d.)

Shain argues that one of the key loci of this shift in recasting the roles and responsibilities of teachers is in the "industry" of Further Education or lifelong learning. Further Education for teachers has brought into the state-sponsored education system "the discipline of the market" and has emphasized ideologies such as Total Quality Management (TQM) that encourage "the internalisation of control, and surveillance of workers."

Another controlling feature is the way in which managerialism turns senior professionals, who might be resistant to loss of professional autonomy, into managers, 'by giving them budgets or by setting them adrift as quasi-autonomous business units' & #8230;. This led to a shift in the locus of control from the centre to the local college site with power invested in the Principal as manager for the state in face-to-face relations. (Shain, n.d.)

Such a model, as pushed by Further Education courses as well as other aspects of the educational hierarchy, runs counter to the more traditional model of teacher as a master worker, essentially analogous to a master worker in a craft system (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 71).

One of the central dynamics in the current education profession is a push towards considering it to be a profession. While this might sound as if it would rebound to the advantage of teachers (who does not want to be a professional, after all?) it has stripped a great deal of the authority from teachers. By the constant push towards further professionalization and lifelong learning, the power structure of the teaching profession is reducing the importance of experience, a more craft-based perspective (Hager, Gonczi, & Athanasou, 1994, p. 13).

While certainly there are always new things to learn in any career, the current focus on always having to learn new information and new techniques strips teachers of the authority that they have traditionally gained through years of experience. This sets aside the traditional model of functional meritocracy as described by Talcott Parsons as well as (in a very different epistemological vein) the idea of the self-reflective teacher (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 89). As Shain notes, much of what has happened in the last generation or so (and certainly the last decade) of the teaching profession is that teachers have been urged and even essentially required to look to external sources for validation of their own skills.

Such a trend may look superficially like an acknowledgement of the skills and professionalism of teachers, but it should more accurately be seen as a de-skilling of the profession with authority to define expertise being removed from the teacher (Tomlinson, 1996). Experience and expertise have been redefined (and fundamentally transformed) into ideas about competence. This is not the same thing (Clow, 2001). A professional who is encouraged to base her or his sense of skill on being able to provide an integrated set of skills and knowledge to their targeted population (in this case, students and their families) has significant autonomy. Teachers in the increasingly market-defined and driven world of British education lack this, and so do not even properly meet Robson's model of professionalism.

Clow (2001) describes this situation:

The holistic professional will be operating in the extended dimension described by Carr, '… capable of reliable, responsible and informed decisions about what lies in the best interests of those whom they are in the business to serve.

Randle and Brady (1997) argue that teachers are being de-professionalized through the kinds of infiltrations by market ideology that have been discussed above. However, they also found that there is some significant resistance on the part of teachers to being redefined in an external way and in a way that denies te validity of their experience and service.