Schooling Teachers: Professionalism or disciplinary power?

Abstract

Since public schooling was introduced in the nineteenth century, teachers in many western countries have endeavoured to achieve professional recognition. For a short period in the latter part of the twentieth century, professionalism was seen as a discourse of resistance or the ‘enemy’ of economic rationalism and performativity. However, more recently, governments have responded by ‘colonizing’ professionalism and imposing ‘standards’ whereby the concept is redefined. In this study, we analyse transcripts of interviews with 20 Queensland teachers and conclude that teachers’ notions of professionalism in this second decade of the twenty-first century are effectively reiterations of nineteenth century disciplinary technologies (as proposed by Michel Foucault) yet are enacted in new ways.

Keywords:

• disciplinary power
• Foucault
• professionalism
• teachers

Notes

1. Foucault’s archaeology traces bibliographic references or citations and as professionalism is an already well-researched and well-theorized concept, we have presented it here as a table (Table 1).

2. The use of the word ‘teachers’ in this study refers to all levels of the hierarchy within schools. This will help capture subject positions.

3. One of the characteristics of Foucault’s language is his repeated use of certain key words. Many present no difficulty in translation, but others such as ‘gaze’ have no normal equivalent. In such cases, it is generally preferable to use a single unusual word. In The birth of the clinic (Foucault, 1973), the unusual ‘gaze’ is used to mean the common ‘regard’.