Hargreaves - Four Ages of Professinalism
Hargreaves - Four Ages of Professinalism
Hargreaves - Four Ages of Professinalism
To cite this article: Andy Hargreaves (2000) Four Ages of Professionalism and
Professional Learning, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 6:2, 151-182
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713698714
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Introduction
Teaching in many parts of the world is in the midst or on the edge of a great
transformation. The expectations of teachers to get their students to high standards of performance, to ensure that all of them are literate and can and do learn,
are escalating. Contexts of rapid change and uncertainty are drawing, and sometimes forcing, many teachers together to work more collaboratively in order to
respond to such change effectively. Pressures and demands in some countries for
students to learn new skills such as teamwork, higher order thinking and effective
use of new information technologies, call for new styles of teaching to produce
these skills meaning that more and more teachers are now having to teach in
ways they were not themselves taught. Teachers have been encouraged to work
more with their colleagues and access the expertise they need to improve. Schools
are having to reach out more to parents and communities, and this raises
questions about teachers expertise and how they can share it with people beyond
their schools.
At the same time, shrinking public-sector nances and tightening policy controls have been pushing teachers to do more work, more compliantly and for
limited reward. Overworked and underpaid teachers have had to master and
comply with centrally imposed learning standards, detailed curriculum targets
and pervasive testing regimes and they have seen their work and their worth
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it was; nor is the professional learning required to become a teacher and improve
as a teacher over time. This paper identi es four broad historical phases in the
changing nature of teachers professionalism and professional learning.
These phases are not universal, but are relatively common across Anglophone
cultures although there are differences even there (for example, teaching is far
from being an all-graduate profession in New Zealand). The phases are ones with
which many other nations are now engaging, however, although not necessarily
in the same order. For example, Chile is trying to move more towards being an
all-graduate profession (a characteristic of the second age of professionalism; see
later), while at the same time experiencing more school-based staff development
(a third-age phenomenon) [1]. The ages should therefore be seen as a contingent
history of Anglophone nations that now contribute a collage of opportunities with
which other cultures engage, rather than being viewed as discrete stages with an
evolutionary necessity that all other cultures must follow.
The four ages are:
the
the
the
the
pre-professional age
age of the autonomous professional
age of the collegial professional
fourth age post-professional or postmodern?
I will argue that the fourth age, which we are now entering, is marked by a
struggle between forces and groups intent on de-professionalizing the work of
teaching, and other forces and groups who are seeking to re-de ne teacher
professionalism and professional learning in more positive and principled postmodern ways that are exible, wide-ranging and inclusive in nature.
The Pre-Professional Age
Teaching has always been a demanding job, but it has not always been a technically
dif cult one. Even in the earliest incarnations of mass education, teachers struggled
alone in their own classrooms to cover content with large groups of oftenreluctant learners, with few textbooks or resources to help them, and with little
reward or recognition. Teaching and learning could never be pursued without
reference to the necessities of classroom control, and teachers success and survival depended on their ability to balance the two.
In their investigation of the history of educational change efforts in the US,
Tyack & Tobin (1994) point to the emergence of what they call a grammar of
schooling. Like language, they argue, schooling has a fundamental grammar. Just
as the grammar of language frames how we can speak, so the grammar of
schooling frames how we can educate. Each grammar has its origins. But once
established, each grammar also becomes highly stable, slow to change. Two of
these the graded school (with its batch-processing of age-graded cohorts divided
into `classes) and Carnegie course credits that have constituted the subject-based
criteria for high-school graduation and university entrance became institutionalized decades ago and now form the contemporary grammar of schooling.
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tored especially closely by the transmission teacher, and used to `steer his/her
judgements about the management and development of the lesson for the class as
a whole (Dahloff & Lundgren, 1970). The teachers predominant practical concern
is not with the learning experiences of individual students, but with the overall
instructional ` ow of the lesson with how well it is proceeding to its intended
conclusion and maintaining order as it does so (Clark & Peterson, 1986).
At the heart of traditional patterns of teaching in Western societies, therefore,
are fundamental problems of order and control. In her study of four junior high
schools, Metz (1978, p. 67) remarked that `school staffs are preoccupied with order
because order is constantly threatened. In his classic text on the Sociology of
Teaching, Willard Waller memorably depicted the school as `a despotism in a state
of perilous equilibrium capable of being overturned in a moment (1932, p. 10).
The successful teacher in this setting, he said was `one who knows how to get on
and off his high horse rapidly (p. 385). Traditional patterns of teaching were
understandable coping or survival strategies for teachers in the rst six decades of
this century, given the purposes, constraints and demands that teachers had to
meet (Hargreaves, 1977, 1978, 1979; Woods, 1977; Pollard, 1982; Scarth, 1987).
For a century or so, transmission teaching formed the accepted and largely
unquestioned wisdom of what teaching really was. In this pre-professional view,
teaching was technically simple. Once you had learned to master it, you needed
no more help after that point. Schools where teachers continue to believe teaching
is basically easy, where the pre-professional view persists, are ones that Rosenholtz (1989) has described as `learning impoverished. With teachers who feel
there is little else to learn in teaching, they achieve poorer results in basic skills
achievements than their more professionally oriented counterparts.
In this context of pedagogical certainty, professional learning for new teachers
was largely seen as a matter of apprenticing oneself as a novice to someone
who was skilled and experienced in the craft. In reality, much of that apprenticeship was served in the thousands of hours observing ones own teachers while
being in their classes as a student (Lortie, 1975). To this experience was usually
added a period of teaching practice or practicum, served at the side of an
experienced cooperating teacher (as they later came to be called) as part of a wider
programme of teacher preparation (Hargreaves, D., 1994).
Such teacher preparation programmes within American Normal Schools, for
example, began humbly, given the limited visions of teaching for which new
entrants to the occupation were then being trained; although teacher educators
fought hard to improve the status of their courses and programmes over time.
David Labaree (1992, pp. 136 137) describes this historical trajectory in the case of
the US.
The rapid proliferation of high schools at the end of the nineteenth
century posed a competitive threat to normal schools, but also gave
normal school faculties the opportunity to raise admission standards and
pursue college status. By the 1920s, normal schools were being converted
wholesale into state teachers colleges, which in turn transformed the
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still, and what kinds of supports and learning opportunities teachers need to
improve their work even further.
Governments who are largely interested in keeping costs down, demeaning
teaching and tightly controlling it have little chance of being persuaded of this
view. Arrogance is even more impervious than ignorance as an obstacle to
dialogue. Instead, educators everywhere would do best to realize that when the
arteries of communication to government are blocked, it is best to build a by-pass
around them and capture the imagination of the public on whose votes governments ultimately depend by opening up schools and teaching in all their complexity to the community, making what educators do more visible, and thereby
countering the pervasive nostalgia for `real teaching that keeps the pre-professional prejudices on which governments can feed alive (Hargreaves & Fullan,
1998).
The Age of the Autonomous Professional
From the 1960s onwards, the status and standing of teachers in many countries
improved signi cantly, compared with the pre-professional age. Canadian teachers, for example, achieved substantial salary raises in the 1970s as did British
teachers through the Houghton pay award of 1973. Almost everywhere, teacher
education became increasingly embedded within the universities, and teaching
moved closer and closer to becoming an all-graduate profession (Labaree, 1992).
In England and Wales, especially, teachers enjoyed unprecedented autonomy over
curriculum development and decision-making especially where they worked
with courses or age groups that were not constrained by the requirements of
external examinations (Lawton, 1980; Lawn, 1990). With the international space
race, and the commitment to investing in developing scienti c and technological
expertise, educational innovation mushroomed in mathematics, sciences and other
subjects as well. Governments and charitable foundations invested in imaginative
and ambitious curriculum projects and packages that stimulated excitement about
curriculum development. Developed by `experts in Higher Education, Regional
Laboratories and similar organizations, these projects encouraged individual
schools and teachers everywhere to take up the projects ideas, and experiment
with the new approaches to student-centred learning that they contained. This
was the era of curriculum innovation, of designer projects, and of appeal to
individual teacher initiative as the levers for educational change (Weston, 1979).
Although projects were often formally adopted, however, they were rarely implemented faithfully in the classroom, still less institutionalized into the routines of
teachers practices (Fullan, 1991). Paradoxically, this was because of the very
autonomy of teacher judgement that these projects presumed subject department heads might agree on purchasing the materials, but how classroom teachers
taught them was ultimately left to their individual `professional judgement with
the effect that the innovations were often used in very different ways than their
designers intended (for example, Atkinson & Delamont, 1977).
In this post-war period, the words `professional and `autonomy became
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during this period was remarkable (Fullan & Connelly, 1990), the shape it took
was less impressive. Workshops and courses were delivered off-site by experts,
and received by teachers as individuals, who were then unable to integrate what
they had learned into their practice when they returned to workplaces that did not
understand or support their efforts (Little, 1993).
One of the overriding characteristics of teaching at this time was its individualism (Hargreaves, 1980). Most teachers taught in a box. They instructed their
classes in isolation, separated from their colleagues. In the 1970s and 1980s,
individualism, isolation and privatism were identi ed as widespread features of
the culture of teaching (Zielinski & Hoy, 1983; Rosenholtz, 1989). Johnsons (1990)
study of 115 `good teachers (among whom one might expect higher than usual
rates of collaboration) still found an important minority of isolated teachers within
the sample. Of those who did collaborate, the majority maintained close relationships with only a very small number of colleagues. One of her respondents
comments is especially poignant.
Teachers are isolated people. They dont know what others are doing.
Things that work for them, they keep year after year. You dont have the
time to sit down and discuss with each other from different areas. As
small as this school basically is, I dont know all the people who are here.
(Johnson, 1990, p. 151)
When teachers did interact, this tended to be around materials, discipline, and
individual student problems rather than about curriculum goals, teaching behaviour, or classroom learning (Lortie, 1975; Little, 1990).
The consequences of teachers classroom individualism, and the individualistic
ways in which they experienced inservice courses off-site and away from their
immediate colleagues, were extensive and disturbing. They included:
lack of con dence and certainty about effectiveness because of limited feedback
on performance (Rosenholtz, 1989)
impaired improvement as a teacher, because of lack of opportunities to learn
from colleagues (Woods, 1990)
limited senses of ef cacy, and of self-belief in the power to change childrens
lives and futures, because of lack of feedback and support (Ashton & Webb,
1986)
tendency to focus on short term improvement that makes a difference in ones
own classroom, with ones own students, rather than on more fundamental
forms of long-term or school-wide change (Lortie, 1975)
proneness to self-defeating guilt and frustration, especially among exceptionally
committed teachers (Hargreaves, A., 1994; Johnson, 1990)
lack of consistency and coherence between teachers in expectations and programmes that are created for students (Campbell, 1985)
lack of professional dialogue that might cause teachers to re ect on and
re-shape their practice in ways that could serve students better (Little, 1990)
the irony that isolation does not create a kaleidoscope of individuality and
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the physical, egg-crate structure of schooling that divided teachers from one
another and which efforts at collaboration always had to overcome (Lortie,
1975)
the habit and routine of teachers having already worked within existing grammar of schooling for decades; the impossibility for many teachers of imagining
anything else (Hargreaves, A., 1994)
economizing of effort in the face of unwanted multiple innovations and accelerated educational reform (Flinders, 1988; McTaggart, 1989; Dow, 1996)
anxiety and self-doubt about competence, whose aws would be exposed by
observation and inspection a point that has been widely asserted but not
empirically proven (Hargreaves, 1980; Joyce & Showers, 1988; Rosenholtz, 1989)
strong emotional bonds with students from whom primary or elementary
teachers in particular get valuable `psychic rewards, that they do not want to
weaken by sharing those students with other colleagues (Lortie, 1975)
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(for example, Nias et al., 1989, 1992; Campbell & Neill, 1994; Acker, 2000; Lieberman & Miller, 2000), not least as a way of making sense of and responding to new
external curriculum and assessment demands (Helsby & McCulloch, 1997). What
factors have been responsible for the emergence of collaborative teacher cultures?
Why have they started to gain such prominence in recent times?
No one factor can be regarded as the crucible of collaboration. Many in uences
have forged it into existence. These include the following.
Expansion and rapid change in the substance of what teachers are expected to teach.
This makes it harder and harder for individual teachers to keep up with
developments in their subjects, and makes teamwork and coordination of
knowledge increasingly essential (Campbell, 1985; Hargreaves et al., 1992).
Expansion of knowledge and understanding about teaching styles and methods. How
teachers teach is no longer an amateur assumption (Soder, 1990), an unquestioned tradition. Nor is it a matter of taking ideological sides between progressives and traditionals, Left and Right. The knowledge base on teaching
strategies has expanded dramatically in the past decade and a half, with
metacognition, situated cognition, cooperative learning, computer-based inquiry, student self-assessment and portfolio assessment all in uencing the eld
(Joyce & Weil, 1980). No one teacher can be a virtuoso performer of all of the
strategies. And no one method can be conclusively or comprehensively shown
to be scienti cally superior to the rest. What matters is how the strategies are
selected and combined to meet the needs of particular and unique groups of
students in any setting. Drawing judiciously on the knowledge base, teachers
working together in one school or department can ful l this task collectively
much better than they can alone.
Addition of increasing `social work responsibilities to the task of teaching. Teachers
say their job is more and more packed with social work responsibilities (Hargreaves, A., 1994). They have to deal with and they worry about escalating
violence in their schools (Barlow & Robertson, 1994). Changing family structures and growing poverty are widely seen as a source of dif culties (Elkind,
1997; Levin & Riffel, 1997). Guidance or pastoral care is now viewed as every
teachers responsibility, not just that of a specialized few (Levi & Ziegler, 1991)
and teachers must work together more to resolve the learning and discipline
problems they face (Galloway, 1985).
Integration of special education students into ordinary classes. Teachers today have
to deal with a much wider range of abilities and behaviours than many once
had. This requires individualized learning programmes, additional planning,
and more consultation with special education resource teachers, to draw on
extra expertise that classroom teachers do not always have themselves (Wilson,
1983).
Growing multicultural diversity. This also challenges teachers to acknowledge the
wide range of understandings, prior knowledge and learning styles that exist in
their classes, and to modify their teaching practice accordingly (Ryan, 1995;
Cummins, 1998). Teachers must learn how to individualize their teaching and
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a difference with their students. Such cultures also in uence teachers willingness to take risks, and the likelihood of their being committed to continuous
improvement (Ashton & Webb, 1986; Rosenholtz, 1989; Talbert & McLaughlin,
1994; Newmann & Wehlage, 1995; Ross, 1995; McLaughlin, 1997). When this
collaboration extends beyond talk into practice and joint work among teachers,
when the ties between teachers are strong and professionally meaningful, then
the bene ts are likely to be especially positive (Little, 1990). Moreover, peer
coaching between teachers has been shown to add greatly increased value to the
successful implementation of new teaching strategies (Joyce & Showers, 1988).
Teachers normally learn better together than they do alone. `Like students,
teachers learn by doing, reading and re ecting, collaborating with other teachers, looking closely at students and their work, and sharing what they see
(McLaughlin, 1997).
In this respect, professional development is usually most effective when it is not
delivered by extraneous experts in off-site locations, but when it is embedded in
the life and work of the school, when it actively secures the principals or
headteachers support and involvement, and when it is the focus of collaborative
discussion and action (Little, 1993). Accordingly, this period has witnessed a shift
in patterns of professional learning, inservice education, and pre-service teacher
education, to more school-based forms [2]. Teachers often learn best in their own
professional learning communities. Many of these are often on-site, built into
ongoing relationships and teams within departments, in interdisciplinary teams
across them, in speci c projects and task groups, and so forth (Little & McLaughlin, 1994; Siskin, 1994; Grossman, 1996). A strong collaborative culture (Nias et al.,
1989) or professional community (Talbert & McLaughlin, 1994) can even make
highly effective use of external input including the much-maligned one-shot
workshops and inspirational speeches by `experts because teachers process it
together in ways that have value and make sense for the school community in
which they work (Wideen et al., 1996).
The forms of collaboration that have emerged during this age are quite different
from those that have been initiated in the fourth age as a speci c and episodic
response to imposed curriculum reform, which, the research shows, tends to fade
away fast once the initiatives have been implemented and individual business can
resume as usual. This has demonstrably been the case in the implementation of
the English and Welsh National Curriculum, for example, confounding predictions of David Hargreaves (1994) that it would unintentionally herald a `new
professionalism in teaching (Woods et al., 1997; Helsby, 2000).
Summary and Implications
In the still emerging age of the collegial professional, there are increasing efforts
to build strong professional cultures of collaboration to develop common purpose,
to cope with uncertainty and complexity, to respond effectively to rapid change
and reform, to create a climate which values risk-taking and continuous improve-
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targets, standards, and paper trails of monitoring and accountability). These may
have comforted governments and others with `procedural illusions of effectiveness (Bishop & Mulford, 1996), but they have also subjected teachers to the
micro-management of ever-tightening regulations and controls that are the very
antithesis of any kind of professionalism.
Not surprisingly, in a deepening context of de-professionalization, which these
developments represent, particular initiatives like collaborative planning or rewarding teachers for excellent classroom performance (that could in other circumstances be professionally positive) are instead interpreted and responded to
cynically by teachers. If they are weighed down by obese reform demands,
teachers are unlikely to exercise their talents wholeheartedly in collaborative
planning. They will construe it as a time-consuming ruse to have them steer
through the details of policies which have been pre-decided centrally (and for
which they, not the policy-makers, will be held accountable) (Webb & Vulliamy,
1993). Similarly, when teachers work within an overall climate where the profession generally is subjected to public blaming, shaming and intrusive inspection,
then any moves to establish a higher paid cadre of `advanced skills teachers are
perceived as at best tokenistic, and at worst divisive. As research on advanced
skills teachers in Australia has shown, one common reaction when new initiatives
and their coordination are required in a school is that teachers turn to their newly
elevated colleagues and in effect say, `youre the advanced skills teacher you do
it! (Ingvarrson, 1992).
If teachers are to maintain and pursue their professionalism at this point, they
will at the very least need to defend themselves against these powerful forces of
de-professionalization. This means maintaining and reasserting many (although
not all) parts of the modernistic project of teacher professionalization that were
most prominent in the age of the autonomous professional.
Teachers must continue to struggle for substantial and competitive salaries for all
teachers that will attract and retain highly quali ed people in the profession
and not just for a few in positions of responsibility or with `advanced skills
status. This also entails persuading politicians and the public of the value of
modestly increasing taxes to fund this strategy in order to bene t the children
that teachers teach.
Teachers must counter the discourses of derision, of blaming and shaming, among
politicians and the media, that have helped create and sustain a loss of public
faith in, and regard for, teachers and their work. This does not mean that
teachers should bury their mistakes or gild the lily when evaluating their own
or their colleagues performance. Indeed, as Scheff (1994) argues in his extensive
writings on the sociology of shame, shame is not all bad. Healthy individuals
acknowledge both pride and shame in their past actions. Only when we deny
shame, he says, (as is common in Western societies) and project it on to others
as blame, do negative consequence arise in the form of con icts and standoffs
whether among nations, within families, or between unions and governments.
For the public regard of teachers to be increased, politicians must be pressed to
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As far as possible, teachers ensure that their collaborative energies are directly
connected to the task of improving teaching, learning and caring in school and
that those connections are made obvious not only to teachers, but to parents and
students as well.
A convincing public case has yet to be made as to why teachers need time for
collaboration within the school day and not just after school or during the long
vacations. To teachers, time to plan, prepare, mark and meet is never suf cient.
To the public, especially when compared with their own of cial hours of work,
it seems almost endless. The research evidence for the bene ts of increased
teacher time for working together seems almost incontestable (for example,
Fullan, 1991). Meanwhile, the gap between professional and public perceptions
of the need for such time seems largely unbridgeable. This is a gap that teachers
must start to close one parent, one school at a time.
Teachers must direct their collaborative efforts toward positive change not only
within their own schools, but also with their colleagues elsewhere, across the
profession as a whole. One of the key initiatives here for teachers professional
effectiveness and public credibility is for them to set and meet an exacting set of
professional standards of practice. Although there is increasing support across the
world for this idea, these standards are often viewed as things that other people
set for teachers (as with the Teacher Training Agency in England), as something
that an elite of appointed teachers sets for a minority of their colleagues who
voluntarily commit to them (as with the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards in the United States), or as something that teacher representatives
of a unionist tradition use to describe and justify existing levels of practice
instead of trying to raise them to a higher level (Ontario College of Teachers).
No professional self-regulatory body in teaching seems yet to have developed
the stomach or teeth to raise professional standards among all its members.
Until such commitment is made, teaching will continue to lack professional
credibility in the publics eyes, and teachers will continue to be the victims
rather than being in the vanguard of educational reform.
Pushing Professionalism Further
Marshalling a more effective defence against de-professionalization is still not
enough to protect and promote the professionalism of teaching; however, in the
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work out beyond the classroom. Vincents (1996) research indicates that most
teachers prefer parents to work with the school as supporters or learners, since this
enlists parental support but leaves existing versions of the teachers professional
authority intact. In these sorts of roles, parents basically support the teacher, by
raising funds, organizing special lunches, preparing materials, and so on. They
may even undertake practical tasks in the classroom like mixing paints or hearing
children read (and in doing so, come to observe how complex the teachers job is).
They may be helped to understand new developments in the curriculum through
workshops or classes, or they may be asked to participate in and co-sign home
school contracts about their childrens learning and behaviour.
These relationships, however, are all too often professionally controlling and
defensive. Vincent shows that `support often amount to co-optation and surveillance with the homes contract commitments being very speci c, while the
schools contract commitments are evasively general. Also, because professionals
often disagree about preferred teaching methods, teachers work to exclude parents from the core issues of teaching, learning and assessment that perhaps should
concern them most in an effort to minimize or stave off potential threats or
embarrassment (Brito & Waller, 1993). In other words, the strength of relationships that teachers have with parents outside the school around core issues of
teaching and learning may depend on the consistency of professional understanding about teaching and learning issues within it. In this respect, postmodern
professionals who interact with people beyond the school must also be collegial
ones inside it postmodern professionalism includes and depends on collegial
professionalism.
Teachers and parents tend to be especially dif dent about issues of discipline.
Unlike cultures such as Japan, where schools and families collaborate closely on
behavioural and disciplinary issues (Shimahara & Sakai, 1995), teachers in many
Western countries are caught in the paradox that parents often judge schools by
their disciplinary record, but that, in teachers eyes, they disapprove of teachers
interfering with their own disciplinary judgements (Wyness, 1996; Blase, 1987).
Assessment is another area in which teachers often feel insecure when talking
to parents. Many teachers suspect that they may be assessment impostors, that
their technologies of grading are unsophisticated, subjective and suspect making
them open to parental criticisms which they tend to avoid. More responsive and
open processes of assessment and reporting to parents can conversely reduce
anxiety among teachers whose practices increase understanding and trust with
parents (Earl & LeMahieu, 1997) especially, when, once again, teachers routinely
discuss assessment issues and particular examples of student work among themselves.
One other problem area in parent teacher relations is that teachers are often
inclined to have assumptions and expectations about parental interest and support that are socially or ethnoculturally biased. Studies over many years have
pointed to educators misjudgements about parental involvement for example,
misconstruing failure to attend meetings as failure to support their children or the
school (for example, Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967). Professionals
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are often inclined to impose their own culturally skewed values about good
parenting onto social groups different from themselves (Burgess et al., 1991; Levin
& Riffel, 1997). Dehli & Januario (1994) recommend that schools and classrooms
should be organized so that parents have easy and regular access, so that
communication with parents takes a variety of forms and so that parent teacher
communications can be conducted in different languages (also Henry, 1994).
The literature on parent teacher relations suggests that considerable strides
have yet to be made beyond parent teacher relationships that sustain teachers
senses of professional superiority (parents as supporters or learners), to ones of
genuine partnership where relationships between teachers and parents are both
open and authoritative (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996) where, in Vincents (1996)
terms, they are relationships of reciprocal learning.
In postmodern professionalism, teachers should try to learn from parents as
well as having parents learn from them. There are many ways to do this,
including two-way student reports (Earl & Le Mahieu, 1997), having students run
interviews with their parents on parents night in relation to portfolios of work
they have accumulated (rather than teachers trying to run and control all the
communication themselves) (Hargreaves, 1997), setting homework assignments to
be shared with a family member (Epstein, 1995) and setting up focus groups of
parents to talk about their concerns, where the role of teachers in each group is
primarily to listen and learn, and not to argue or defend (Beresford, 1996).
If postmodern professionals should be authoritative yet open in their relations
with parents, and prepared to work with them in conditions of reciprocal learning, it is important that these partnerships are not idealized and that those who
advocate them do not represent all parents as being altruistic and perfect. Just like
children, parents can be a pain sometimes they can try and get special deals for
their own children (lenient grades, assignment to the best teacher, movement out
of mixed ability tracks, etc.) (Oakes et al., 1997), or ri e through papers on the
teachers desks when he/she is out of the classroom (Acker, 2000).
But it is even and especially when parents are critical, suspicious and dif cult
that partnerships are essential in the age of postmodern professionalism. Teachers
must move towards the danger here, rather than closet themselves away (Maurer,
1996). It is in teachers own interests to treat even imperfect parents not just as
irritants or as targets for appeasement, but as the most important allies teachers
have in serving those parents own students and in defending themselves against
the widespread political assaults on their professionalism.
The public is yet to be convinced that teachers need more time to work with
each other, and not just their students. It has, in large part, yet to understand how
and why teaching, and the students whom the teachers teach, have changed since
the time most parents were themselves at school. It is not yet persuaded to commit
to the kind of tax increases that would bene t the public education system and the
quality of those who teach in it. For too long, the public has been a fragmented
body of individuals prone to nostalgia in an age of uncertainty, impressionable
in the face of political and media-driven derisions of schools and teachers today,
and easily bought by the market ideology of parental choice which helps them
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believe that, in times of chaos, at least their own individual choices can bene t
their own children in their own schools. It is now vital that the teaching profession
works in partnership with the public, to become a vigorous social movement of
acting subjects rather than fragmented individuals (Touraine, 1995), who work
together to improve the quality and the professionalism of teaching.
When the arteries of communication to government are blocked as they are
where governments remain under the sway of neo-liberal market ideologies, and
have minimal commitment to public education and public life then teachers
must build a by-pass around governments, and capture the public imagination
about education and teaching today, on which governments and their electability
ultimately depend. Developing a postmodern professionalism that opens schools
and teachers up to parents and the public one classroom, one school at a
time where learning runs authentically in both directions, is most likely to build
the trust, the commitment and the support for teachers and teaching on which the
future of their professionalism in the postmodern age will depend.
Conclusion
So we are now on the edge of an age of postmodern professionalism where
teachers deal with a diverse and complex clientele, in conditions of increasing
moral uncertainty, where many methods of approach are possible, and where
more and more social groups have an in uence and a say. Whether this postmodern age will see exciting and positive new partnerships being created with groups
and institutions beyond the school, and teachers learning to work effectively,
openly and authoritatively with those partners in a broad social movement that
protects and advances their professionalism, or whether it will witness the
de-professionalization of teaching as teachers crumble under multiple pressures,
intensi ed work demands, reduced opportunities to learn from colleagues, and
enervating discourses of derision, is something that is still to be decided. That
decision, I believe, should not be left to `fate, but should be shaped by the active
intervention of all educators and others in a social movement for educational
change which really understands and advances the principle that, if we want
better classroom learning for students, we have to create superb professional
learning and working conditions for those who teach them.
The conditions for such a social movement to grow and ourish are now
starting to take shape at the turn of the century. The teacher demographics are
favourable a rash of retirements (hastened by teachers demoralization with the
effects of educational reform) is leading to a crisis of teacher recruitment in many
parts of the world. Governments are consequently having to make strides (albeit
small ones at rst) to improve the public image of teaching so as to attract more
people into the profession by, for example, holding impressive commissions on
the status of teaching (Australia) and the future of the profession (US), committing
to higher pay rises than usual (New Zealand), or devising schemes to reward
`advanced skills teachers (England and Australia). Governments are already
beginning to bend. The public demographics are also favourable with the aging
176
A. Hargreaves
boomer generation seeing their own offspring leave home, and starting to become
involved in their later years less with their own private interests and their own
families, and more with volunteering and participating in the wider community.
The forces of de-professionalization in teaching have cut deep. But the objective
prospects for a re-invigorated postmodern professionalism, and the creation of a
broad social movement that would support it, are strong. If teachers want to
become professionally stronger, they must now open themselves up and become
more publicly vulnerable and accessible. That is their paradoxical challenge in the
postmodern age.
Correspondence: International Centre for Educational Change, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ont.,
Canada, M5S 1V6. E-mail: [email protected]/
Notes
[1]
[2]
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