Professionalism, performativity and care: whither teacher education for a gendered profession in Eur

1
Professionalism, performativity and care
whither teacher education for a gendered
profession in Europe?

• Professor Sheelagh Drudy
• University College Dublin

2
Paper Outline

• discourses on teacher education
• highly feminised nature of teaching
• changes that have happened in universities
• implications for teacher education
• current European policy on teaching and teacher
  education
• published research evidence from EU, North
  America, Australasia, research in Ireland

3
A highly gendered profession

• 70 teachers in primary education are women
• lower secondary education is not as high as in
  primary education
• of women in upper secondary education less
  striking but outnumber men in nearly all
  countries
• policy in relation to teaching and teacher
  education must take account

4
Discourses on teaching

• discourse of domesticity
• discourse of femininity
• discourse of care
• discourse of performativity and new
  managerialism
• discourse of professionalism

5
Discourse of domesticity

• Domestic ideology women naturally more
  disposed towards nurture than men
• Women greater suitability for teaching very young
  children
• perception of school students and student
  teachers that women best suited to primary
  teaching
• most frequent explanation for the low proportion
  of men in primary teaching the perception that it
  is a womans job

6
Discourse of femininity

• linked to the discourse of domestic ideology
• notions of female domesticity and service linked
  to teacher professional identities
• women teacher educators read their own working
  lives through images of female domesticity
• discourse of femininity found in primary teacher
  education programmes
• women teachers reproduce, rather than change,
  traditional gender patterns

7
Discourse of care

• care central and fundamental to human development
  and well-being, social solidarity, and to
  economic development
• nurturing capital
• feminine and feminist ethic of care (Gilligan)
• concept of care linked to concept of justice
• caring-for and caring-about (Noddings)

8
Three-fold taxonomy of care (Lynch)

• Primary care relations
• Secondary care relations
• Tertiary care relations

9
Discourse of care

• The affective domain, or caring about children,
  is fundamental to teacher professional identity
  (Barber)
• Ethic of care embedded in Codes of Professional
  Conduct of Teaching Council (Ireland)
  As well as
  the legal duty of care which teachers exercise,
  their role as carers is central to their
  professional value system

10
Care

• Understood in many different ways by teachers -
  caring as commitment, caring as relatedness,
  caring as physical care, caring as expressing
  affection, caring as parenting and caring as
  mothering (Vogt)
• a moral perspective
• an ethic of care understood as responsibility for
  and relatedness to their pupils
• ethic of care should be an integral element of
  quality in teaching and in teacher education

11
Care

• Orientation to social justice
• Altruistic values, making a difference
• Irish research - male and female student teachers
  were more strongly oriented to caring or
  altruistic values than were second-level pupils
• Male student primary teachers markedly different
  from other males in relation to their attitudes
  to caring/altruistic values
• Ethic of care should be an integral element of
  quality in teaching and in teacher education

12
Discourse of performativity and new
managerialism

• Neo-liberalism
• Audit culture
• Removal of locus of power from practicing
  professionals to auditors
• Surveillance
• New? - payment by results 19th C. Irl
• Research on negative aspects of performative
  pressures in teaching

13
Discourse of professionalism

• Managerial and democratic professionalism (Sachs)
• Managerial discourse dominant
• Associated with neo-liberalism
• Involves re-organising the public sector
  according to best commercial practice
• Involves masculinising school cultures

14
Discourse of professionalism

• Democratic professionalism
• Emerges from the profession itself
• Relies on trust rather than performance ranking
• Emphasis on collaborative, cooperative action
  between teachers and other educational
  stakeholders

15
Teacher Education, Universities and
Performativity Cultures

• Teacher education mainly located within
  universities in Europe
• Rise of the entrepreneurial university
• Development of performativity, managerialism and
  audit cultures
• Advantages to states of performativity cultures
  in higher education
• Research on problems emerging
• Tensions between cultures of teacher education
  and performativity cultures

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Teacher Education in Changing Environments

• Role of universities in the deepening of
  democracy, the fostering of social justice and
  the public good
• Teacher education, educational sciences,
  educational research a very important element of
  universitys role
• Role of teachers in daily lives of entire
  populations
• Importance of higher education in initial and
  continuing education (Commission of EU)

17
Teacher Education in Changing Environments

• Impact of research on policy agenda
• Importance of retaining teacher education in
  universities/higher education
• Space to develop reflective and critical
  practitioners
• Harvest potential of research-based,
  problem-centred teacher education

18
International Policy on Teaching and Teacher
Education

• Lisbon, Bologna, Bergen implications
• Commission of EU common principles, statement
  to parliament
• Teaching high status, high reward,
  well-qualified profession with opportunity to
  continue studies to highest level
• Teachers lifelong learners who understand social
  cohesion and exclusion in society and ethical
  dimensions of the knowledge society reflective,
  analytical and critical practitioners
• Teacher education an object of research

19
International Policy on Teaching and Teacher
Education

• OECD Teachers Matter
• Economic competitiveness and efficiency, high
  quality in teaching
• Enhance the status of teaching
• Language performativity, performance indicators,
  standards, evaluation and appraisal
• concern at decline of males in the profession,
  based on supposed benefits of male role models
  and decline in appeal of teaching

20
Conclusions

• Teaching highly feminised in Europe
• Disjunction between performativity discourse and
  discourses integral to teaching, such as an ethic
  of care
• Universities now imbued with performativity
  cultures yet retaining university involvement in
  teacher education is fundamental to professional
  status
• Need to align professional agendas with EU policy
• Need to add an ethic of care, social justice and
  solidarity to teacher education policy in Europe