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Abstract
At the heart of many current debates about curriculum and curriculum policy is an inadequately conceptualized and articulated notion of teachers’ professional discretion. This paper begins to detail a normative and descriptive theory of the social and individual conditions required for the development of professional discretion. A better understanding of teachers’ professional discretion should enable professional curriculum developers and policy writers to help teachers to adapt to the dynamic, complex social conditions of schooling.
Notes
1. Moreover, the concept of ‘autonomy’ is caught up with a particular liberal conception of the self and its relationship to society that many find untenable (Kerr, Citation2002; Winch, Citation2002). Rather than clarifying and defending my position among these multiple, ambiguous, and contentious interpretations of professional autonomy (see also Evetts, Citation2003), my strategy here is to show that a robust concept of professional discretion enables us to resolve many of the problems associated with the professional autonomy literature.
2. To be explicit about my assumptions, I am throughout this paper taking the position that teachers are neither able to make unfettered rational choices nor that their choices are entirely socially determined. Instead, I assume that teachers are able to exercise some rational deliberation, limited by both cognitive and social constraints (Simon, Citation1956, Citation1979; see also Shulman & Carey, Citation1984; Feldman, Citation1992).
3. The ‘myth of discretion’ is the notion that legal and professional actors can act rationally without regard to their social context or the consequences of their action. Instead, Baumgarter argues that while people’s behavior is not formally predictable, it is sociologically predictable; most of the time we can guess how a person will act if we know her social circumstance (see also Bargh & Chartrand, Citation1999, for a discussion of psychological determinants of behavior).
4. Haworth focused on developing what he called a socio‐psychogenetic theory of autonomy and argued that autonomy ought to be the goal of adult development. I borrow from his work the psychological and social categories required for autonomy because what he called ‘minimal autonomy’ would more accurately be described as discretion.
5. Articulated this way, I am taking the stance that rationality and seemingly rational action can only be seen in retrospect, not in prospect (Simon, Citation1956; Haworth, Citation1986).
6. To see that procedural independence and self‐control are necessary (and, with competence, sufficient) for autonomy, one needs to understand that only oneself and other people are able to reduce self‐rule. Procedural independence ensures self‐rule with respect to other people and self‐control ensures self‐rule with respect to oneself.
7. Since self‐control and independence build upon competence, we might claim the latter as more fundamental. This does not mean that we are able to judge a teacher’s professional discretion by their competence.
8. Many writers and teacher educators believe that critical reflection constitutes a minimum requirement for teachers and for this reason might question my distinction between procedural and substantive professional discretion. I make the distinction because I believe that competence, self‐control and procedural independence are logically prerequisite for substantive independence, and that in many schools a teacher can be recognized as minimally competent without being self‐critically reflective. Thus, my claim for the distinction between procedural and substantive discretion is descriptive rather than normative.
9. Relying too much on a particular curricular solution, for example, will negatively affect one’s autonomy because a teacher will be ‘blinded’ to better possible solutions.
10. In his theory of decision‐making Simon (1954) critiques the traditional rational agent views of problem‐solving in which the purpose was to satisfy all constraints of the problematic situation. He argued that people are simply incapable of the pure rationality such theories presume, either psychologically or sociologically. Instead, he asserted that people simply seek an adequate solution within a set of constraints—which he called ‘satisficing’.
11. It might seem that flexibility and controllability are the same thing because if one is to control a system then it must be flexible, and vice versa. The important difference is that flexibility refers to the way a participant uses the system, whereas controllability refers to the possibility of changing a system’s organization. A curriculum is inflexible when it is regimented; it is uncontrollable when decisions are made without the teacher’s input.
12. Prior to the 1980s curriculum policies in these countries often gave teachers more discretion than most were able to effectively use, giving most teachers too little guidance and doing little to maintain curriculum alignment and coherence. But, to be clear, I am not arguing that curriculum policies should not take the middle ground between flexible and inflexible, controllable and incontrollable, a little or a lot of discretionary access. Such a policy environment would only suit those few teachers who are themselves of moderate professional discretion, and would still allow too much discretion for the less experienced teachers and too little for the more.
13. Of the five major policy perspectives (Malen & Knapp, Citation1997), only the organizational perspective considers these issues. However, it looks at teachers as a group within an organization and not the role of individual teachers in policy decisions.
14. This tendency to ignore the attributes of individuals within policy environments is seen in the classics of curriculum policy (Meyer & Rowan, Citation1977; Wise, Citation1979; Lipsky, Citation1980; McNeil, Citation1986; Porter, Citation1989). These analyses can come to such divergent views of the roles of teachers in curriculum policy because the researchers ignore the attributes of individual teachers and the other factors in the domain of curriculum practice.
15. This does not mean that we should assume that teachers are unencumbered by individual or social constraints as the literature on professional decision‐making has often assumed (Clark & Peterson, Citation1986).