‘Bound by recognition’¹

1. The title of this essay is taken from a book of the same title: Markell, P. (2003). Bound by recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

: some thoughts on professional designation for teachers

Abstract

A recent move in the effort to professionalize teaching has been a call for a professional designation for teachers in some Canadian jurisdictions. While teacher certification or licensure seeks to protect public interest and is concerned about professionalism – the quality of teachers' work – professional designation is concerned with public recognition of teachers' professional status, that is, acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the intellectual and ethical location from which teachers act – teachers' identities. While not wishing to argue for or against professional designation per se, I do want to reveal a certain predicament that results when the teaching profession becomes ‘bound by recognition’ (Markell, 2003). The predicament relates to the limits of identity: in the context of recognitive encounters with others, human beings constantly exceed and frustrate prior identifications, often contradicting their own expressed and deepest commitments. What then, one may ask, is the use value of recognition for the profession?

Keywords:

• professionalization
• recognition
• teacher identity

Acknowledgement

This work was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. The title of this essay is taken from a book of the same title: Markell, P. (2003). Bound by recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2. The research study (Pitt & Phelan, 2005) from which I draw this interview is entitled, ‘Paradoxes of Autonomy in Professional Life’. The purpose of the study is twofold: (1) To learn about autonomy by examining the expressions of various struggles within the profession to manage, ignore or resolve this paradox; and (2) to learn about the activities of teaching and learning and the institutions created to house these activities by investigating the qualities of autonomy experienced, desired and rejected by teachers. Guided by discussions of autonomy in the humanities, the social sciences, and the human services, the inquiry includes in-depth phenomenological interviews with teachers and policy analysis in two national contexts – Canada and Germany. The main research questions are: How do teachers experience, construct and negotiate autonomy? What are the dilemmas of autonomy for becoming and being a member of the teaching profession? What, if any, discourses of autonomy have emerged as privileged and normative, as others have been eclipsed or silenced? What do the processes of privileging and silencing reveal about the relationships among identity, autonomy, and power within the profession of teaching?

3. My reading of Stella's (pseudonym) interview transcript is informed by Markell's (2003) reading of Antigone. I'm engaged in a form of analogical thinking (Jardine, 1998) that is interested in the similarities, likenesses and correspondences between two different realms of discourse – interview transcript and a play. My intent is not to collapse one on the other but to resist the isolation of each realm into their differences. I wish to revive a conversation between literature and research so that the preoccupation of playwrights, poets and novelists – human experience – can have a stronger presence in empirical research about teaching and teacher education.

4. Jean Francois Lyotard (1984) likened language games (Heaney, 2009; Wittgenstein, 2001) to the game of chess, defined by a set of rules which in turn determine the properties of each piece, and the appropriate way to move them. ‘The rules themselves do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explict or not, between players … [I]f there are no rules, there is no game … [E]very utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 10). The game is played out within various ‘forms of life’ (e.g. Education) and the latter provide the background and context against and in which the game plays out its sense and reference (Schrag, 1997, p. 32, cited in Phelan, 2004).

5. See School Safety Community Advisory Panel. (2007). The road to health: A final report on school safety. http://www.schoolsafetypanel.com/finalReport.html.

6. From p. 282, Arendt, H. (2007). Reflections on literature and culture. (Edited and with an Introduction by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb.) Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.