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Teachers' Professional Lives IVOR F. GOODSON & ANDY HARGREAVES (EdS) (1996)
London, Falmer 238 pp.
40.00 (hardback), 14.95 (paperback)
The title of Goodson and Hargreaves' bookTeachers' Professional Lives-is optimistic, though they well understand the reasons why some might lean towards a notion of the proletarianised lives of teachers. They argue that there is a case to be made for both constructions of the lives of teachers, but one is left with the suspicion that they and some of their co-authors see a state-centred professional rhetoric suffusing the harsher, stressed-out realities of the lives many teachers now lead: 'Persuasive rhetorics of professionalisation all too often seem to be accompanied by conditions where professionalisation is actually being dismantled' (p. 3). The collection of writings, commissioned specially for the book, are international in their range. Most are broadly sociological in their focus. The editors in their introductory chapter bring a good deal of conceptual clarity to the rather elastic notion of what counts as professionalism. This they achieve by generating a classification of professionalism: classical professionalism; flexible professionalism; practical professionalism; extended professionalism and complex professionalism. And ahead of us, perhaps, is postmodern professionalism. On balance, the classificatory scheme has a plausible ring to it, though some might want to tie up a few loose conceptual ends.
Provocatively Tomas Englund asks, `Are professional teachers a good thing?'. This gets us away from the doctrinal disputes about professionalisation and professionalism, and it leads us to Englund's notion of `didactic competence' (p. 83). The didactically competent teacher would not lay claim to the certainty of technological touch that a `professional teacher' would claim; rather, all would be problematised, continually, collectively. The content of schooling would be derivative of this collective scrutiny. On this reading, Englund's notion of the didactically competent teacher could well be absorbed into Hargreaves' and Goodson's classification referred to above. Englund says, `The content of education is the key to these different possibilities (for the didactically competent teacher), and what we need to do is relate our choice of content to...