What does it mean to work in education today? Professional learning, doing and being

The first three articles in this open issue of International Studies in Sociology of Education foreground constantly evolving professional roles in the shifting sands of education, from early years through to higher education. Barbara Read and Carole Leathwood explore early career researchers’ views on the challenges they face in developing academic careers as well as presenting established academics’ perceptions around economic insecurities, performativity agendas and academic legitimacy. They argue that, ‘pre-existing patterns of social inequality are intensified by the dynamics of precarisation’ (p.335). They draw on Butler (2009) and Lorey (2015) to conceptualise the politicised processes through which once stable structures are progressively destabilised. In higher education, this has led to new modes of justification of purpose and value, at institutional and individual levels, based on quantifiable measures. Those measures create illusions of stability but belie, ‘chronic existential anxieties’ (p.336) and the seeping of business discourses and evermore performativity-driven practices into academic spaces. Impacts include the questioning of academic legitimacy and increasing out-of-hours unpaid labour by individuals feeling the need to justify their contribution through quantifiable publications and other measurable research outputs. Later, career academics seem to recognise the challenges for new academics and note the unjustness of practices that, in establishing their own careers, they did not have to face.

The second article by Andrea Nolan and Tebeje Molla turns our attention to the early childhood education sector to examine the role of mentoring in the development of teachers. Nolan and Molla, basing their study in Australia, note the drive to raise standards, ‘to ensure the delivery of consistent, accessible and high quality children’s services across the country’ (p.353). In the state of Victoria, this has led to the implementation of a mentoring programme to support the professional development of early years practitioners in parallel with the policy drive to raise professional qualification levels in the sector. Nolan and Molla draw on Bourdieu’s sociology to understand the field of mentoring practice and observe the way that mentoring can provide safe, collegial spaces where critical reflection is possible. They see, ‘reflexivity as a way of being “vigilant about our practices”’ (p.358). Optimists may be able to see the potential for mentoring across all education sectors as a means to both develop professional practice and resist the erosion of professional identities. In this sense, it is an appropriate segue from the first article which generates questions about how to respond to a precarious, marketised and metricised academic environment; mentoring and wider academic support may offer one form of counter measure.

Damian Page is the author of our third paper, taking up the issue of the surveillance of teaching professionals. He argues that the growing demand by superiors to demonstrate one’s value and achievements has led to teachers increasingly seeking to make their practices ‘conspicuous’. This results in a marketisation of the self through formal and informal means ranging from annual appraisals to social media platforms. There is an intensification of manicured representations of professional selves. It is interesting that although Page argues that one reason teachers engage in ‘conspicuous practice’ is related to a ‘fear factor’, corresponding with some of the anxieties surfaced by Read and Leathwood, he notes other reasons too. Significantly, he argues that some teachers use conspicuous practice as a ‘means of routine resistance, using visible work as a means of disguising their actual practices, a means of impression management to gain rewards, re-appropriating control over professional practice or even just avoiding work’ (p.376). Drawing eloquently on Foucault, Diderot and Bauman, this paper argues that the ‘the educator’s subjectivity’ can be preserved through a cloak of what appears to be conformity (p.379). Here again we see a possible tool that may well also be used in the academy to counter performativity demands and what James Wilsdon (2016) has called the ‘metric tide’.

The next two papers in this issue pivot our focus to consider wider cultural influences on educational processes. Christopher Lynch and Elizabeth Rata use a New Zealand study to examine the extent to which pedagogy should be ‘culturally responsive’, noting the disparity in educational achievement of Mãori students compared to their non-Mãori peers. They argue that the education policy emphasis on socio-cultural knowledge as a means to redress negative colonial impacts on indigenous populations has backfired. Instead, they propose the development of epistemic identity through the development of an engaging knowledge-based curriculum and pedagogy. This is a thought-provoking study that puts a spotlight on the impact of how teachers’ professional roles are informed by social, economic and academic agendas and driven by competing epistemologies.

The fifth paper by Julia Häuberer and Tobias Brändle shifts our gaze from professional to student perspectives and behaviours. In particular, it examines the role of students’ social networks in providing social capital to support decision-making and transitions of prospective undergraduate students in Germany. They argue that those with multiple and greater social capital networks, for example, involving family and peers, potentially draw less heavily on these reserves than individuals with more scarce social and academic capital resources. Their findings potentially challenge the idea that there is a linear relationship between social capital and its benefits and hence the titular suggestion that there is a ‘marginal utility of social capital’. This is an interesting proposition and one that gives pause for thought to outreach and widening participation professionals seeking to enrich social capital amongst prospective university applicants.

We are delighted to be launching a brand new occasional section in International Studies in Sociology of Education. It is called Research in Translation, and it follows our main article section. The section is curated by Inés Dussel, the Research in Translation (RiT) editor, and it begins with a potent and highly stimulating introduction from Inés, inviting you to actively engage in creating generative discourse on the role of language and locations of research. We encourage you to consider contributing to this section of our journal, and Inés will be pleased to receive enquiries and suggestions for content. Gustavo Fischman and Sandra Sales are the first contributors to Research in Translation with an article entitled, The Freirean Factor. This is extremely timely given the fiftieth anniversary this year of the publication of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is also in keeping with some of the broader strands of enquiry covered in this issue related to professional roles and the art of pedagogic practice.

In our final section of this issue, we have a book review symposium on Diane Reay’s, Miseducation, reviewed by Caroline Sarojini Hart, Sol Gamsu and Evgenia Dermitzaki. The book centres on enduring inequalities in the English education system and the reproduction of social injustice. We are very pleased to have a response to this symposium by Diane Reay which furthers her ‘reflexive socio-analysis’. Diane comments that in writing Miseducation she aimed to shine a light on an ongoing struggle to address social injustice and to ‘make the world a better place’.

Our concluding piece in the book review section is a rejoinder to The Diversity Bargain book review symposium written by its author, Natasha Warikoo (the original book review symposium was published in issue 4, Volume 26 of International Studies in Sociology of Education, pp.426–31). We are grateful to Natasha for continuing the dialogue. Looking ahead, we welcome ideas for books to review so do get in contact if you have come across a new book that may be of interest to our readership.

As we end our editorial for the final issue of Volume 27, let us take this opportunity to wish you all the best for the New Year.