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Abstract
This article investigates the professionalism of a group of women teacher educators working on initial teacher education (ITE) courses for intending primary school teachers in England. The article draws on data from an empirical study in the education departments of two universities. At the time of the research, these universities had just undergone major changes to the ways in which their ITE courses were organized and taught. The data show how the women teacher educators challenged these changes to their established ways of working and the implied threats to their constructions of caring professionalism. The article analyses how and why the changes affected the women’s senses of professionalism, drawing on Davies’ concept of gendered inclusion in professional life. It also discusses how and why these women’s form of professionalism developed within these institutional settings by identifying a cumulative convergence of discourses within the field of primary ITE.
Notes
1. Primary schools in England educate pupils from 5‐ to 11‐years‐old; secondary schools educate 11‐ to 16‐ or 18‐year‐olds. In the English elementary school system of the nineteenth century pupils from the ages of 5‐ to 14‐years were taught in the same school.
2. Pastoralism is defined here as the exercising of vocational guidance by the tutor of the integrated professional and personal qualities needed to undertake primary teaching.
3. Following Brown (Citation1999, p. 11), this term is used ‘to signify the dialectical nature of production/reproduction’.
4. Differing discourses of craft professionalism, focused around very different professional and political agendas, can be found in both Government documents and intra professional sources. As many authors identify (see Hoyle & John, Citation1995; Hargreaves & Goodson, Citation1996), the 1980s and early 1990s saw the re‐emergence of a craft tradition in teaching valorising experiential, often tacit, professional and personal knowledge of teaching. The idea of teacher as reflective practitioner, as formulated by Schon (Citation1983) was part of such validations, although this concept has its roots, traced back through the work of Dewey (Citation1933), in much older Judaeo‐Christian constructions of morality and teaching as a moral act.
5. The ‘recent and relevant’ criterion of Circular 3/84 (DES, Citation1984) and the follow up legislation in 1989 (DES, Citation1989) were designed to ensure that all teacher educators working on ITE courses had up to date knowledge of the primary school sector.
6. Pseudonyms have been used for all the universities and individuals to ensure anonymity. The term ‘post‐1992 university’ refers to institutions which were given university status by statute in 1992. Most of these institutions were polytechnics prior to this date.
7. Following John (Citation1996), I have defined the modelling strategy used by the tutors as having two forms: direct and stylistic modelling.
8. A possible parallel here is with the changes to teacher professionalism which occurred as a result of the National Curriculum reforms of 1988 onwards. A number of studies, including Acker (Citation1997) and Osborn et al. (Citation2000) indicate that resistance to the changes and senses of professional loss in the early stages of the changes were followed by accommodation and assimilation in the later stages. Debates are ongoing about whether such changes represent a de‐professionalization or a re‐professionalization of teaching.
9. An additional irony in this study is that the model of primary school professionalism which the teacher educators here are trying to (re)produce may not have congruence with the discourses and practices within the contemporary primary school sector.
