The professional role and identity of teachers in the private and state education sectors

Abstract

This paper compares the professional role and identity of teachers in private and state schools. It brings together theory within the sociology of the professions and approaches influenced by Basil Bernstein. It utilises his work on recontextualisation to identify the nature of teachers’ professional role; and Beck and Young’s (2010) Bernstein-influenced analytical framework to understand changes in these teachers’ professional identity. Drawing on focussed qualitative research the study shows how, within private schools, when cloistered from the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) an idealized account of teachers’ professional work flourishes. This idealized understanding of occupational professionalism is contingent on the ‘othering’ of the state sector: to do this private-school teachers adopt a deprofessionalization discourse which represents the state teacher as a passive receiver of the ORF. In contrast, state teachers foreground their agency to negotiate competing professional logics which they express through hybrid approaches to professional practice.

Keywords:

• Professions
• Bernstein
• occupational- professionalism
• organisational-professionalism
• teacher agency
• hybrid professionalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While Ball and Inglis draw on the apocalyptic The Second Coming when discussing changes to teacher’s professional practice, this quotation is from W.B. Yeats’ less well-known poem Easter 1916.

2 The debates mirror wider questioning of ‘expert knowledge’ and the consequences of epistemological relativism. Recent debates have seen two authorities within the field – Collins and Sismondo- take different positions on their work’s relationship to ‘post-truth’ politics: the former argues that there is resonance between the two, if not direct causality; while the latter claims that ‘epistemic democratization does not mean a wholesale cheapening of technoscientific knowledge’ (3) see Collins, Evans, and Weinel 2017; Sismondo).

3 This research on the impact of data generation on teachers’ professional practice has begun to influence UK policy (if only rhetorically at this stage): for example Ofsted (2019) have recognised the deleterious ramifications of such ‘data-idolatory’, claiming that ‘data should not be king’ (TES 2019); while DEFE (2019, 15) claim that they will ‘look unfavourably on schools that implement burdensome data collection practices’.

4 ‘Deprofessionalization’ is placed in parenthesis here are as this paper rejects the de/reprofessionalization binary with the former being represented as reductionist and deterministic which as the subsequent discussion shows is somewhat of a straw man argument.

5 Evetts’ general typology of occupational and organisational professionalism has clear parallels with Hoyle’s (1974) representation of the ‘extended’/restricted professional (without the implicit normative underpinnings).