Lifelong Learning and Teacher Professionalism Debates

Introduction: The Complexity of Teaching as a Profession

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 thinking about pedagogy. Against a backdrop of shifting political winds and genuine complexity about what constitutes the most effective ways of teaching, it is difficult for teachers to make well-informed decisions about how to engage in lifelong learning activities that will truly benefit their students while also 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 question of how the idea of professionalism within the teaching sector is defined — are affected by politics and broader shifts in society that reflect evolving ideas about the relative importance and responsibility of the state versus 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 sites of this shift in recasting the roles and responsibilities of teachers is in the "industry" of Further Education and 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."

Political Shifts and the Redefinition of Teacher Professionalism

Another controlling feature is the way in which managerialism turns senior professionals — who might otherwise resist the loss of professional autonomy — into managers, "by giving them budgets or by setting them adrift as quasi-autonomous business units." 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 promoted by Further Education courses and by other aspects of the educational hierarchy, runs counter to the more traditional model of the teacher as a master worker — essentially analogous to a master craftsperson in a guild or craft system (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 71).

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

While there are always new things to learn in any career, the current focus on continually acquiring new information and techniques strips teachers of the authority they have traditionally earned through years of experience. This sets aside both the traditional model of functional meritocracy as described by Talcott Parsons and — 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 over the last generation, and certainly the last decade, is that teachers have been urged and even effectively required to look to external sources for validation of their own skills.

Market Ideology and Managerialism in Further Education

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

Clow (2001) describes this situation by reference to a more holistic model: the holistic professional operates in the extended dimension described by Carr — one "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 exactly the kinds of infiltrations by market ideology discussed above. However, they also found significant resistance on the part of teachers to being redefined in external terms that deny the validity of their experience and service.

These researchers likewise focused on Further Education as one of the key sites in the profession where the struggle over competing concepts of professionalization plays out. While they found that "teaching in FE is being deskilled and deprofessionalised," it is equally true that "teachers retain a commitment to 'public service' values of altruism and teacher autonomy that are fundamentally opposed to managerialism." This should be encouraging to those who believe that teachers are better judges of their own practice than are politically driven assessment organizations.

Conclusion

Tomlinson, J. (1996). Inclusive learning. Coventry: Further Education Funding Council.