Care of the profession: teacher professionalism and learning beyond performance and compliance

ABSTRACT

Dominant policy discourses in Australia define teacher professionalism as a technical accomplishment. Within this technical framing, teacher learning is largely understood as the acquisition of skills, with teacher practice helping students meet pre-determined outcomes. Despite the dominance of such discourses, teacher professionalism and learning have not always been thought of in these reductive ways. This paper reports on an intergenerational, dialogic inquiry into the careers of 12 long-serving English teachers, presenting two cases from the project. The study used life history methods to interview retired or late career English teachers in the state of Victoria, Australia. An analysis of the interviews indicated that professional learning was vital in sustaining generative careers. Many of the professional engagement activities described by teachers in the project involved acts of stewardship or care for the teaching profession itself. The paper advances ‘care of the profession’ as a concept that makes visible the many acts of professional engagement and learning beyond individualistic and performative understandings of teaching and that invest in education as a ‘going concern’. We argue that practices constituting ‘care of the profession’ are sites for democratic participation in the teaching profession and are essential elements of a critically engaged and agentive professionalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher professionalism
• care of the profession
• professional engagement
• professional identity
• life history
• praxis

Introduction

Teacher professionalism has become increasingly defined as a technical accomplishment under the auspices of neoliberal reforms to education (Ball 2016; Ball and Olmedo 2013; Connell 2009; Holloway and Brass 2017). In Australia, a teaching career is officially mapped against a set of generic professional standards stipulating what ‘teachers should know and be able to do’ (AITSL 2011, 4) upon graduation and then at various junctures over a career. The Australian situation is reflective of an education reform movement across the world (Sahlberg 2015). This reform agenda has resulted in greater bureaucratic control of teaching (Biesta 2017), standardisation of practice (Brass and Holloway 2021) and a diminution of professional autonomy and discretionary professional judgement (Baird and Elliott 2018; Dadvand and Cuervo 2020; Kostogriz and Doecke 2013). These developments have had effects on how teacher professional learning and engagement are managed through official channels, such as teacher education accreditation (Mayer and Mills 2021; Rowe and Skourdoumbis 2019), teacher registration, and guidelines for professional learning and promotion (AITSL 2012a, 2012b). Overall, the effect has been to tie teacher professional learning and engagement to meeting professional standards, framed within a logic of performativity and compliance (Ball 2003; Mockler 2013). In this environment, practice traditions of teacher-led inquiry and teachers as researchers (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009; Parr 2010; Yandell 2019) are displaced by an emphasis on ‘best practice’ (Smagorinsky 2009) and the application of ‘evidence based’ strategies as defined by external authorities (McKnight and Morgan 2019; Wescott 2021). Under such conditions, teachers are positioned as subject to professional discourses and practices from external authorities, rather than as the designers of professional learning on terms set by the profession itself. Furthermore, teacher professional learning and engagement, as forums for democratic participation in professional life, are reshaped to fit a more limited agenda of compliance (McKnight 2016). Not incidentally, professional citizenship activities are also contexts for exploring and debating the overall aims and purposes of practice among teachers. However, evidence suggests that questions of values and purpose are increasingly foreclosed by questions of effectiveness and ‘impact’ (Biesta 2015; Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009; Kostogriz, Doecke, and Illesca 2010).

This paper reports on a study of 12 late career and retired English teachers who worked for the majority of their careers in the state of Victoria, Australia. These teachers began their careers during the 1960s–1980s, with some still currently in the workforce and others retired. The study, called ‘The cultural memory of English teaching’, was framed as an intergenerational dialogic inquiry into long careers in English teaching. The focus on English teachers was prompted by two developments on the contemporary education scene. First, the retirement or imminent retirement of a generation of English teachers who entered practice during a period when progressive ideas about literacy education were gaining influence in Australia and the UK (Dixon 1970; Gibbons 2017; Medway et al. 2014; Tarpey 2018; Turbill 2002). Second, recent policy focus has adopted standardised approaches to teaching and assessing literacy development, with implications for pedagogy and professionalism (Kostogriz and Doecke 2013). In other words, a standardised and instrumental understanding of literacy teaching has come to the fore at the same time as members of the profession who remember another way are leaving the workforce, taking their professional memories with them (Doecke, Turvey, and Yandell 2016). Furthermore, progressive understandings of English and literacy education have been subject to ‘discourses of derision’ in politico-media commentary and policy, subjecting English to scrutiny and top-down control (Hardcastle and Yandell 2018; Snyder 2008). With these developments in mind, it is timely to inquire into the professional memories and identities of long-serving English teachers in particular, as members of the teaching profession who have negotiated high levels of intervention into their practice in recent years (Gibbons 2017). Their experiences and sense-making about decades of practice provide us with a historical vantage point from which to critically engage with recent developments the profession faces.

Our inquiry sought to address the following research questions:

• How do long-serving English teachers understand their practice over time?

• What patterns of continuity and change do these teachers see in English teaching over their years of practice?

• How did long-serving English teachers sustain their practice through the decades?

In this paper, data from two interviews are presented. The study adopted a life history approach where rich, contextualised accounts are favoured (Goodson and Sikes 2016). The rationale for this approach is to work with the way teachers created narratives of their professional histories. The aim is to present narrative data so that the historical and social conditions of the experiences can contextualise particular instances and to pay attention to the meanings participants made of their professional lives. The two cases presented exemplify the prominence of professional learning and engagement across the interviews in the study and highlight the importance of this learning and engagement for the teachers’ reflections about their careers and their particular professional, historical and social contexts. Importantly, the forms of learning and engagement evident in the narratives illustrate how professional learning was a key element in teachers’ sense of themselves as active and agentive professionals.

We now turn to the particular ways in which professional learning and engagement were talked about in the interviews. Prominent in each teacher’s career narrative across the data set were activities oriented towards stewardship and care of the teaching profession. Activities of this type included leading faculties, leading professional learning in and beyond their immediate workplaces, working in teacher education and mentoring new teachers, serving on professional committees, leading and contributing to curriculum and assessment reform, working on state-wide text selection panels, editing scholarly and professional journals, coordinating conferences, being active in subject association and professional networks, and advocacy work representing the profession in the wider political arena. These activities went beyond how professional learning is typically represented by performative discourses of teacher professionalism that position teachers as only applying knowledge about teaching derived from external authorities. In contrast, the engagement and learning represented in these teacher accounts exceeded the replication of ‘best’ or ‘evidence based’ practice, and the promulgation of such practices to other teachers; the narratives situated teachers as agents of professional learning and engagement. In some instances, the learning and engagement were connected to intellectual debates about the meaning and purpose of schooling. Moreover, these activities at times went beyond the remit of ‘service’ to the profession to encompass efforts to transform and renew the profession in clear engagement with the broader politics of education. In most cases, this was within the subject specialism of English, but the issues raised within subject English often spoke to its place in the aims and purposes of education as a whole.

These acts of stewardship, engagement and concern were so distinct a pattern in the data that it warranted a way of naming and analysing this dimension of the teacher participants’ professional lives. We have called these activities ‘care of the profession’, to highlight an ethical orientation towards the teaching profession itself that goes beyond narrowly technical understandings of leadership and performance. By calling attention to ‘care’, we are signalling that professional engagement and learning often involve attending to the social and relational fabric of a profession, which activates questions of views and values or the motivating purposes of a profession. As Cochran-Smith and Boston College Evidence Team (2009) argue, in relation to teacher education, ‘in addition to posing empirical questions’, teacher professional learning ‘always poses values questions that cannot be settled simply by assembling good evidence’ (458). It involves a recognition of a profession as a joint enterprise or a going concern in which questions of values and purpose are activated and in contest – despite current conditions that suppress joint, open inquiry into these issues (see Biesta 2017).

Our use of the phrase ‘care of the profession’ invokes Foucault’s idea of ‘care of the self’ – a useful resource for theorising these dimensions of teachers’ professional lives (Foucault 1985, 1990, 1997b). Developed in his later work, ‘care of the self’ presents attending to the flourishing of oneself as the basis for an ethical relation to the self, and, importantly, to others. Foucault argued that care of the self is constituted by:

Those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (Foucault 1985, 10–11)

‘Care of the self’ is more than ‘self-care’ that merely allows one to work and comply with performative demands for yet another day. Care of the self is also a site of struggle with power, where discourses and practices that seek to position oneself as subject to them are contended with in the production of ‘counter-conducts’ and ‘counter-stories’ in the interests of one’s agency and self-formation (Ball 2017). Significantly, the origins of Foucault’s concept of care of the self are his work with Hellenistic philosophy that makes explicit the connection between care of the self and care and concern for one’s work. Foucault notes that while the Greek phrase epimeleia heautou, means ‘taking care of one’s self’, it also means ‘working on’ or ‘being concerned with’ something (Foucault 1997a, 269). Foucault traces the meanings of this phrase through its associations with ‘agricultural management … the responsibility of a monarch for his fellow citizens … . That which a doctor does in the course of caring for a patient … a sort of work, an activity, it implies attention, knowledge, technique’ (Foucault 1997a, 269). It is in this relationship between care of the self and care for one’s work and others that we see ‘care of the profession’ being the locus for a critically engaged professionalism.

In this paper, we first explore official discourses of teacher professional engagement and learning in Australia, arguing that professional standards and associated policy documents frame teacher professional learning within a technical-instrumentalist orientation. We then consider care and how care adds an ethical and relational dimension to practice that exceeds narrowly instrumental views of teachers’ work. While the phrase ‘care of the profession’ invokes Foucault, the centrality of care in education is evident in a range of critical work on the impacts of performativity on caring relationships in education (see Connell 2013; Kostogriz, Doecke, and Illesca 2010; Noddings 2012, 2013; Polkinghorne 2004). In developing our argument that ‘care of the profession’ is a valuable resource for thinking about professional engagement and learning beyond performance and compliance, we engage with practice theory developed by Kemmis and colleagues (Kemmis 2019; Kemmis and Smith 2008b; Kemmis et al. 2014; Wilkinson 2022). We connect ‘care of the profession’ to ideas about wise action (phronesis) and theory-informed practice aimed at changing conditions for the good (praxis) (Kemmis and Smith 2008a; Reimer et al. 2023). Praxis is contrasted with the more limited orientation to work exemplified in the idea of techne. Two case studies are presented; in these cases, teachers spoke extensively about their leadership of professional learning during their careers. We interpret their leading professional learning as a practice of caring for the profession.

Performative teacher professional engagement and learning

There is broad consensus that ongoing professional learning is crucial to the vitality of the teaching profession (AITSL 2012a, 2012b; Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009; Santoro et al. 2013). However, the precise nature of desirable professional learning is the subject of considerable debate (Connell 2009; Doecke and Parr 2011; Mockler 2013; Parr 2010; Parr et al. 2015; Petrosky 1998). The last two decades has seen an intensifying focus on codifying and regulating teacher professional learning in Australia, bringing it into alignment with other standards-based reforms to education (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009; Mayer and Mills 2021). This codifying and regulating trend has created a situation where practice traditions of teacher-led inquiry and professional citizenship behaviours, such as participating in professional networks or ongoing deliberation about the content, expertise and purposes of teaching, have become marginal to official discourses and practices of professional learning.

The Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), a government-sponsored body for educator professionalism in Australia, has set an official agenda for professional learning. The documents that set out this agenda bespeak the tensions involved in aiming for both a highly educated and professionalised teaching workforce and one that is positioned as subject to the controlling discourse of an authority. For example, the ‘Australian Charter for the Professional Learning of Teachers and School Leaders’ (AITSL 2012a) acknowledges that ‘effective’ teacher professional learning ‘promotes teacher and leader ownership of their learning through active involvement in the design, content, practice and evaluation of their learning’ (5). The Charter endorses professional learning that ‘promotes action, research and inquiry and develops teachers as researchers’ (5). Research is cited that supports teacher professional learning that goes beyond coaching in techniques, citing ‘individual and collaborative research, qualification programs and informal dialogue’ as having ‘the greatest impacts on … practice’ (4). At face value, at least, such statements connect the Charter to longstanding efforts to position teachers as experts capable of shaping a professional learning agenda (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009; Parr 2010; Yandell 2019). Ownership of learning and practices of open-ended inquiry and collaborative research are clearly discernible themes in the Charter. However, these themes are lesser threads in a more dominant pattern of tightly tying teacher professional learning to instrumental goals and an authoritarian positioning of teachers as subject to system-defined objectives. In the same document, it is asserted that ‘[i]mproving student outcomes is the ultimate goal of all teachers and school leaders, and of the professional learning they undertake’ (AITSL 2012a, 4). Such statements consistently conflate student learning with ‘outcomes’ as measured by ‘effect size’ statistical analysis, collapsing any distinction between broader aims and purposes for education and the kind of learning that can be quantified.

In a similar vein, the ‘Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework’ (AITSL 2012b) sets out the performance development cycle through which teachers and school leaders are expected to manage their professional learning. Again, the focus is on a linear relationship between teacher professional learning and ‘student outcomes’. These outcomes are broadly defined as ‘student learning, engagement in learning and wellbeing’ while the Framework ‘acknowledges that these can be measured in a variety of ways’ (4). The purposes of student learning are defined at a higher level with reference to the ‘Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians’ (MCEETYA 2008): ‘[a]ll young Australians become successful learners; confident and creative individuals; active and informed citizens’ (AITSL 2012b, 3). However, the mechanism by which assessments that hope to measure student outcomes connect to these broad and democratic aspirations for Australian schooling remains unexplored. Indeed, there may even be a tension between the kinds of learning that can be readily measured as ‘outcomes’ and the cultivation of creativity, critical thinking and democratic participation.

There is evidence that this tight coupling of teacher professional learning to pre-specified student learning outcomes is having a narrowing effect on teachers’ curriculum work and professional engagement (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009; Mayer and Mills 2021; Wescott 2021). Despite the recognition of a variety of ‘outcomes’, including wellbeing, and a range of ways of providing evidence of improved practice, the contemporary education climate in Australia favours quantitative data about student learning, such as standardised tests (Biesta 2017; Wescott 2021). This has an impact on the kinds of professional learning schools favour and how legitimate professional learning is understood to lead to improvement in practice that has a correlation to improved student performance on standardised assessment. Official discourses of teacher professional learning, such as those outlined above, are silent on how teachers might grapple with intellectual debates within the disciplines, engage with questions of knowledge, or participate in democratic deliberation about the purposes of education. These questions are foreclosed by a relentless coupling of teacher learning to student outcomes as defined at the school and system level.

A focus on student learning is an expected theme in teacher professional learning, and we do not suggest that enhancing student ‘outcomes’ should not be one of the goals of teacher professional learning. What we do argue is that these linear and narrow discourses assume a static consensus about the purposes of education that teachers are positioned as having to subscribe to, as if there are no alternative positions. Processes of dissent, debate, and responding to change are elided by the language of these documents. This risks positioning teachers as subject to an impoverished discourse about the purposes of education and their role within it (Ball 2003; Biesta 2015, 2017; McKnight 2016). As Mayer and Mills (2021) observe, ‘teachers are expected to engage with and be uncritical consumers of existing evidence to improve their practice’ (57). Professional learning is tied to ‘practice as defined’ (Goodson 2014) and the performative management of professional life. Crucially, teachers are positioned by these discourses as being ‘implementers of others’ agendas’ (Mayer and Mills 2021, 56) rather than democratic participants in the ongoing development of a profession.

Care and praxis: a theoretical framework

An ethics of care in teaching has been explored as a crucial aspect of teacher professional practice and judgement. In this important body of scholarship care is seen as a corrective where technical models of teacher professionalism have become the norm (Kostogriz and Doecke 2013; Kostogriz, Doecke, and Illesca 2010; Noddings 2012, 2013; Polkinghorne 2004). Positioned as an alternative to narrowly instrumental approaches to teaching, care is recognised as an ethical relation of concern for others’ welfare, enhancement and flourishing (Gherardi and Rodeschini 2016; Noddings 2012, 2013). Significantly, care depends on sufficient autonomy for the one who cares to engage in situated decision-making to be responsive to the needs of the other (Polkinghorne 2004). Importantly, care involves a relational dimension where the one who cares is attuned to and responding to the particular needs of the person, situation or context. As pointed out by Gherardi and Rodeschini (2016), ‘there is a risk of losing “care” in the face of efficiency, standards of competence, and evidence-based rationality’ (267). In situations of increased bureaucratic and managerialist oversight of practices of care, there is a ‘risk of rationalising care … since care cannot be defined, measured, prescribed’ (267). The growth of outcomes-based education in Australia has put pressure on practices of care. Situated decision-making attuned to the specific needs of individuals and contexts can be overridden by demands to ‘teach to the test’ and movements to standardise teaching practice (Comber 2012; Kostogriz and Doecke 2013). Furthermore, teachers who are concerned by the diminution of responsive care in a performative vision of teacher professionalism are offered performance-as-care as an alternative. Dadvand and Cuervo (2020) point out that, ‘recent education policy reforms have promoted an understanding of care that is increasingly aligned with agendas of school performativity and student achievement’ (141). The caring teacher is incited to become the performing teacher, the compliant teacher, the teacher who adopts ‘evidence based’ practice to ‘lift’ student outcomes.

Hence, notwithstanding its positioning in the research literature, care is not an unambiguous source of resistance to instrumentalist understandings of the teaching profession. It can be a rationale for buffering the demands of an outcomes-based curriculum and its impact on students. Care is evident in attempts to respect the relational dimensions of practice and the specificity of the individual and of individual needs (Comber 2012; Kostogriz and Doecke 2013). However, teachers’ care can also be recruited to serve instrumentalist ends, as performative understandings of professionalism are proffered as the means by which the teacher constitutes themselves as a ‘good’ and ‘worthy’ member of the profession. As Ball (2003) argues, care is subverted as ‘“service” commitments no longer have value or meaning and professional judgement is subordinated to the requirements of performativity and marketing’ (226). In this performative colonisation of care, caring practices can be reified into sets of mandated practices and procedures – the ethical relation is outsourced to a series of standardised decisions. The flaw in this performative understanding of care is that it does injury to the qualities of attunement and ‘engrossment’ (Noddings 2013) that distinguish authentic care from following orders. It also evacuates the teacher as an ethical agent since they cannot be seen to be deliberating and making autonomous ethical decisions if their actions are pre-emptively defined by external authorities. This rationalisation of care damages the pedagogical relationship. As Connell (2013) argues:

To say that education involves nurture is important. Education involves encounter between persons, and that encounter involves care. Learning from a computer is not education; the machine does not care. Learning from a person behaving like a machine is not education; that person’s capacity for care is being suppressed. It is care that is the basis of the creativity in teaching, at all levels from Kindergarten to PhD supervision, as the teacher’s practice evolves in response to the learner’s development and needs. (104)

In summary, in its attentiveness to the relational and ethical work of teaching, care can be a resource for understanding teaching as a practice that extends well beyond the parameters set by performative and instrumentalist discourses. However, for it to serve this role, the teacher must be an agent with enough autonomy to make decisions and to act in service of what they see as the good in particular situations and in relation to the particularity of persons. ‘The good’ here encompasses supporting student learning, but it also invokes a more complex range of considerations that include normative ideals about the purposes of education as they are expressed in daily practice. This may mean, for example, that a teacher prioritises open-ended interpretation and inquiry in their classroom, despite the fact that these forms of learning are difficult to capture in standardised assessments (Holloway and Brass 2017). In other words, care, beyond the ‘care’ of performance, requires scope to cultivate and use professional judgement (Biesta 2015; Kemmis and Smith 2008b; Polkinghorne 2004).

Examinations of care in the teaching profession tend to focus on the caring relation between the teacher and the student (Kostogriz and Doecke 2013; Noddings 2012, 2013; Polkinghorne 2004). There has been less attention to the caring relation between teachers, specifically the care teachers show towards the profession itself as an ongoing concern.

To examine this aspect of care, we invoke the concepts of techne, phronesis and praxis, as they have been applied and developed in relation to education in practice theory (Kemmis 2019; Kemmis and Smith 2008a, 2008b; Kemmis et al. 2014; Wilkinson 2022). Drawing on both Aristotelian and Marxian theories of knowledge and practice, the practice theory notion of praxis emphasises human action oriented towards an end (telos) of the good, or of history making action (Kemmis and Smith 2008b, 2008a; Wilkinson 2022; see also Kostogriz, Doecke, and Illesca 2010). Of course, a definition of ‘the good’, as it is enacted in a social space shared by human actors, will be subject to contestation and ideological struggle. It is this aspect of professional learning, as a context for inquiring into the good of educational practice, that we wish to highlight. ‘the good’ is likely to be subject to debate; for this very reason it remains a useful concept because it foregrounds how professionals – such as teachers – may be animated by more-than-instrumental, means-ends concerns. It is here, in practice aimed towards ‘the good’, and professional dialogue about what this entails, that teachers’ care for the profession can be discerned.

Teachers’ learning and application of craft knowledge, of knowing about teaching techniques and their likely outcome, comes under the auspices of techne. Expressed in the making of objects or the bringing into being certain pre-specified outcomes, techne corresponds to the understandings of teacher professional learning codified in professional standards, and associated official guidelines such as the Charter and Framework (AITSL 2012a, 2012b). In their discussion of techne, Kemmis and Smith (2008a) point out that it is,

the disposition to act in a true and reasoned way according to the rules of a craft, guided by a general aim (telos) of making or producing something … The distinctive form of action associated with technē is poiēsis or ‘making’ action, involving means-ends or instrumental reasoning to make something which achieves a known objective or outcome. (15)

Craft knowledge and professional skill is needed – it is what allows professionals to ‘make things, to make them well, and to get things done’ (Kemmis and Smith 2008a, 15). Within a profession, too, shared knowledge of techne allows professionals to make judgements about the quality of many types of work they and their colleagues pursue and to adjust practice in order to meet internalised criteria of good work. Techne is hence a necessary ingredient of professional engagement and learning, from initial teacher education to professional learning and engagement over the span of a career. Despite its being a necessary ingredient, however, techne does not encompass all that is sufficient for a critically engaged and agentive professionalism. It is limited to the application of skill for pre-defined ends. It is techne that has, in neoliberal discourses of teacher professionalism, informed the model of performance-as-care. Questions as to how practice realises purposes for education, particularly purposes that reach beyond narrowly defined ‘outcomes’, cannot be answered by techne alone.

In addition to techne, then, a practitioner needs a sense of how their practice contributes to an overall agenda for renewal and change for the social, environmental and intellectual endeavours of their local and global contexts. In addition to measurable ‘outcomes’, the teacher also teaches towards other horizons of possibility, other hopes for realisation. It is here that phronesis, as an ethical and discerning judgement, comes into its own. Phronesis, as ‘the moral disposition to act wisely and prudently … with goals and means both always open to review’ (Kemmis and Smith 2008a, 15), is required to connect practice to larger notions of ‘the good’. In this case, ‘the good’ includes student learning outcomes, but may also entail other aims such as cultivating intellectual curiosity and wonder, social justice, inclusion, environmental sustainability or the specific goods fostered by the ways of knowing and traditions of inquiry embedded in the disciplines. In this way, an English teacher, for example, may connect ‘the good’ to nurturing language development, imagination, creativity and a writing ‘voice’ for their students. Crucially, phronesis connects practice to educational philosophy and a sense of coherent purpose for education as a going concern (see Biesta 2015, 2017).

Praxis is the expression of phronesis in action. It is distinguished from techne and poiesis by its being informed by a deliberative and reflective judgement that orients practice towards ‘the good’. Seen in this light then, teacher professional learning conceived as a context for praxis extends its range beyond the application of ‘best practice’ or ‘evidence informed’ strategies to reach narrowly defined ‘outcomes’. A praxis orientation considers how practice enables or constrains the realisation of the goods of education, holistically understood. Acknowledging praxis as an ingredient of teachers’ critically engaged practice means expanding the sense of what teacher professional learning entails that ‘[l]earning one’s craft is not purely a technical affair’ (Wilkinson 2022, 31). As Kemmis and Smith (2008a) note:

To do the right thing (praxis) in uncertain circumstances, when we are faced by perplexity or puzzles about what one should do in any particular circumstances, requires deliberation – consideration of what one is really doing in this situation, and what different kinds of consequences will follow for different people if one decides to do one thing rather than another. (16)

Insofar as praxis recruits a coherent sense of overall purposes, praxis also entails care – care as attunement to the needs of the other, responsiveness to particular situations, and shaping practice to progress it towards the attainment of some goals or ends (telos). We offer here ‘care of the profession’ as a way of thinking about teacher professional learning that activates a care for the vitality and direction of the profession itself – its concerns, its ethical, intellectual and ideological commitments, as deliberated upon by its members. Care of the profession helps make visible the myriad ways teachers sustain and renew professional citizenship and democratic professionalism (Evetts 2011), inclusive of, but going beyond, the application of techne for the achievement of student outcomes.

The study

In ‘The cultural memory of English teaching’ study, we conducted a dialogic, intergenerational inquiry into the professional biographies of 12 (5 males, 7 females) late career and retired secondary English teachers in the state of Victoria, Australia. Based on life history interviews (Goodson 2009, 2014), the study generated narratives of English teachers’ experiences over the decades from the 1960s–1980s to the present.

The interviews were conducted prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic and with teachers in a large urban centre and regional areas. In response to these circumstances, seven teachers were interviewed face to face, and three were interviewed over video teleconferencing software. Each interview ran for approximately 1 hour. One face-to-face focus group was conducted with five teachers, three of whom were also interviewed individually. Study participants were contacted through the authors’ professional networks using purposive and snowball sampling. The interviews focused on formative experiences as a student of subject English; motivations for entering the profession; qualifying to become an English teacher; early years of practice; sites of practice; phases of practice in the individual professional biographies; changes observed in the teaching of English in Australia over the decades; and reflections on important experiences in the formation and evolution of their professional identities. Prior to conducting the study, we obtained ethics clearance from Monash University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC 16726). Informed consent was obtained from participants using a written explanatory statement and a consent form. In email communication prior to the interview, as well as time prior to interview recording, the authors answered questions from participants about the study and the data we were aiming to generate in dialogue with them.

By framing the study as a form of ‘cultural memory’ we are emphasising how individual teachers’ work and lives are lived in socio-historical contexts. Cultural memory studies specifically focus on the intersection of private and public life, or how personal experience, meaning and identity intersect with larger patterns of continuity and change (Erll 2008; Kuhn 2007; Radstone 2011). In her work, Kuhn (2007) defines cultural memory as a process that seeks

fresh insights and new ways of conceptualising and understanding the ways in which people’s personal or individual memories relate to, intersect or are continuous with shared, collective, public forms of memory. (283)

The cultural memory approach to research generates ‘memory texts’ (Kuhn 2007) that are interpreted for how personal experience partakes in socio-historical contexts. In this way, cultural memory work positions itself against ‘official forgetting’ (Hirsch and Smith 2002) evident in the current education policy in Australia. Contemporary reforms to education make little reference to subject and practice histories, particularly as they are evident in traditions of inquiry in the subject disciplines, and teacher-led professional learning where teachers took an active role in setting agendas for curriculum and assessment reform (Gibbons 2009, 2016; Howells 2003; Locke 2007). Indeed, the marked ‘presentism’ (Green and Cormack 2015) of contemporary policy discourses about education is part of the ideological work of such discourses, to ‘displace and erase any alternative and “counter memories” of becoming a teacher’ (Maguire 2017, 483).

With this in mind, we elicited narrative accounts of teaching careers from the participating English teachers. We treated the resulting life history accounts not as transparent representations of the past, but as artfully shaped stories of long careers, presented on the particular occasion of the dialogic interviews. The stories themselves are interpretations, acts of meaning making and identity work on the part of the teachers we engaged with. As we thematically analysed the transcripts of the interviews, we coded the prominent themes that characterised these narratives as indications of what has remained important to the professional identities of these teachers across the passage of years. In line with the aims of our research questions, we used both open thematic coding and an attentiveness to the narrative shaping of meaning in the teachers’ representations of their experiences. Hence, the accounts generated in the interviews were analysed as narrative cases as well as for how they demonstrated themes evident across the data set, in tune with the life history approach of the study (Mason 2018). Professional learning and engagement were a significant aspect of many of the resulting accounts. However, the picture of professional learning that emerged from these interviews was very different to the vision articulated in contemporary official discourses in Australia. We developed the concept of ‘care of the profession’ to bring into focus the many activities these teachers engaged with that enacted stewardship of the English teaching profession. We now turn our attention to two cases that exemplify how care of the profession manifested itself in these teaching careers, with particular reference to leading professional learning.

Care of the profession: leading professional learning

The teachers in the study all spoke about leading professional learning or taking responsibility for stewardship of some aspect of English teaching. Sometimes this took the form of official roles in government-sponsored professional leadership and outreach, while at other times, they were leading learning in local contexts and community or through a subject association. Nonetheless, a significant thread across the interviews was a sense of social and intellectual engagement in the concerns of subject English. In this discussion, we focus on two teachers whose stories epitomise this pattern: ‘Grace’ and ‘Carla’ (all names are pseudonyms).

Grace

Grace is a retired English teacher who specialised in teaching English in technical and vocational settings. Her account of her career was animated by commitments to the intellectual growth of English teachers and fostering their involvement with the disciplinary and theoretical dimensions of practice. Her narrative portrays a rich engagement with leading professional learning in her role as an Education Officer for the state’s English subject association. During this time, she read education and literacy theory and wanted to disseminate the insights of this work. She mentions reading Garth Boomer (1982), Douglas Barnes (1976) and Pam Gilbert (1989) and starting a small book shop at the subject association that made these and other titles available: ‘I wanted to improve the [existing] book room because I wanted to sell books to teachers and I wanted to sell them good books … I started reading much more educational theory’. One highpoint in Grace’s career was developing a professional learning curriculum for secondary English teachers that supported them to use picture books and visual art to teach literary concepts and theory: ‘I got really interested in how you could teach, first of all, language and then literary theory through picture books’. Grace took ‘picture book workshops’ ‘on the road’ for the professional association, visiting art galleries in regional Victoria and running workshops for teachers in country and regional schools.

I had the money to go there [to regional Victoria] and look in the galleries, choose the artworks and then go home and work out what [picture book] text I could use with it and then go back and give a whole day workshop [for teachers]. I used to start off with a picture book workshop and you could see them sitting there with cynical looks on their faces, ‘She thinks we only read picture books’. And by the time I’d finished they were completely sucked in. It was lovely.

And then they’d go off and look at the artwork [in the gallery] using the sort of language they used when they were talking about a poem or a novel, they could see—they could talk about landscape, characterisation, symbol, it’s all there too. And the idea … was to go back to school, take the kids into the galleries and get them to use that language and so on. I really enjoyed that.

Grace’s teacher workshops aimed to connect English teachers’ practice to burgeoning developments in literary theory during the 1990s (see Eagleton 1983; Gilbert 1989; Mellor and Patterson 1996). She attended to, in particular, the needs of teachers working far from cities in an era before digital media made remote professional learning possible. Her leadership of professional learning shows intellectual curiosity, engagement with developments in the field of English/literary studies and a resourcefulness in using the affordances of picture books and regional galleries to make these ideas accessible to other English teachers. Strikingly, Grace’s professional learning workshops show both attention to the need for students to reach ‘learning outcomes’ and an imaginative foray into the practices of inquiry in the discipline that exceed the kinds of outcomes tested for in standardised assessments. For Grace, there was a sense that subject English was a going concern – still evolving, still developing, still being made – and that English teachers could and should participate in this open-ended development. Grace’s workshops positioned teachers as co-constructors of knowledge, as they browsed the galleries to develop their own teaching ideas in response to the stimulus she had provided. This attitude stood in contrast to a view of English as a discrete set of skills and a static body of knowledge about canonical texts and literature; it also positions teachers quite differently to discourses that make them subject to ideas about a narrow techne of teaching. Grace’s ‘care of the profession’ was evident in her care for the intellectual life of English teachers and answering their need to stay in contact with creative and theoretical developments in the field. Her praxis orientation to ‘the good’ in her practice was visible in these commitments.

Carla

Carla worked in subject English education in the 1980s and 1990s before embarking on a second career in public health research. Her account of her English teaching career emphasised the work she did in leading professional learning during a period of rapid change in education. The 1980s and early 1990s saw significant social and economic transitions in the state of Victoria. As the economy shifted to a post-industrial formation, student retention to the senior years of schooling was increasing. The watershed Blackburn Report (Blackburn 1985) that reviewed the provision of postcompulsory schooling in Victoria, mooted the need for pathways that catered to the full diversity of students in the senior years of schooling. The Report’s recommendations triggered an overhaul of the senior English curriculum and the introduction of a new state-wide matriculation programme (Victorian Certificate of Education [VCE]) that embedded progressive ideas about curriculum and assessment (Fordham 1984). The introduction of a new study design for the final 2 years of subject English in Victorian secondary schools during the late 1980s and early 1990s was the context for much of Carla’s work as a leader of professional learning. The then Kirner (Labor) state government (1990–1992) instituted School Support Centres to facilitate the implementation of the new curriculum. Carla said of these support centres:

It was an extraordinary initiative and at their best they were so good. They brought together curriculum consultants, educational psychologists, visiting teachers such as physiotherapists, teachers of the deaf, teachers of the visually impaired […] We ran in-services, we ran networks of teacher meetings, we delivered government policy, we shared knowledge. It was a very rich model of teacher development …. I went into the school support system as an English consultant, which was then converted to a VCE consultant because that was just at the time of the Blackburn Report. […] The VCE was being developed and it was very, very different of course and very challenging. All around the state, in every region there were VCE consultants, and I was one of those. We helped schools and parents and school councils to understand the new system. And we ran in-services, conferences. There was a state-wide implementation plan for the VCE. Assessment practices were changed also, so it was a challenging time for students, teachers and parents.

In Carla’s account there are traces of both techne, as support for ‘implementation’ of the new VCE, and more democratic and participatory understandings of professional life. This period in Victoria has since been regarded as a high watermark of teacher input into curriculum, assessment and educational practice, especially in light of later retrenchments (Doecke et al. 2019; Howells 2003). Carla’s work in the School Support Centres connects professional learning to the aspirations of the original VCE curriculum, which was an expression of progressive ideals of catering to student diversity and the democratic purposes of schooling (cf. DES 1975). ‘Ministerial Paper 6’ (Fordham 1984) was the summary policy document that framed the implementation of the VCE; it proposed broader aims than ‘outcomes’: ‘to prepare young people to enter fully into the life of their society’ and ‘to provide a broad general education for all students’ (Fordham 1984, 8). Situating Carla’s case in this historical context shows how her work in ‘care of the profession’ was conducted at an historical moment where official government policy empowered schools and teachers with the rationale that, ‘[u]nless the school is a place where significant decisions are made, it cannot provide a model which will assist in preparing young people for life in a democratic community’ (Fordham 1984, 9). In Carla’s case, ‘care of the profession’ involved supporting teachers through a significant period of social and educational transition. Her work took her to the interface between government policy and school communities in ways that went well beyond promulgating a pre-determined set of ‘best practices’. The historical context is important in understanding Carla’s story, as it is situated in a time and place where teacher representation at almost every level of decision-making was, for a brief time, a feature:

I was a member of the Department’s Standing Committee for English. This committee included the regional English consultants. These consultants were wonderful teachers. […] This committee and the VCE Field of Study committee were powerful sources of professional development.

Carla’s leadership of professional learning was engaged in a field where views and values about subject English and education were explicitly up for discussion, and indeed the focus of her work and the work of many others. Her practice, therefore, was also a site of praxis, as her story invokes joint efforts among educators to realise a sense of ‘the good’ in education. Her reflections on this time also pointed to the divisions and bitterness of some debates, as the speed of change and the shape of the VCE curriculum ran counter to some teachers’ and community members’ understandings of ‘the good’. This is worth noting as praxis may involve people working at cross-purposes or holding values in tension. Nonetheless, this is in contrast to the eerie consensus conjured by contemporary official discourses of teacher professional learning where an almost exclusive focus on the technical-instrumental aspects of teaching is assumed.

Discussion and conclusion

‘The cultural memory of English teaching’ project suggests that professional learning plays a significant role in the professional identities of teachers. It also suggests that the kind of commitments and practices we have described as care for the teaching profession can motivate and are evidence of critical professional engagement. This care is expressed as a concern for the evolving disciplinary focus of subject English represented in these cases by the leading of professional learning about literary theory and the supporting of teachers through a time of significant curriculum reform. Both Grace and Carla exercised phronesis, as well as techne, in their leading of professional learning and in their professional engagement. Grace devised imaginative, inquiry-based workshops for teachers that positioned them as members of a discourse community of subject English specialists participating in the ongoing development of their practice and of the discipline. In her role as education officer of a subject association, she expressed a praxis orientation to her work as she supported teachers in their learning and engagement. Meanwhile, Carla’s story illustrates the importance of socio-historical contexts for shaping opportunities for critical professionalism, and how individual careers adumbrate social and political changes in the practices of schooling.

In each of these cases, ‘care of the profession’ involved care for an aspect of subject English and acts of stewardship that promoted socially progressive agendas shared among some members of the English teaching profession. This care involved the individual practitioner in a wider professional sociality where traditions of inquiry are maintained and extended. In these teachers’ narratives, English education is understood as a joint enterprise, a going concern. These narratives represent a professional life where English teachers have autonomy to make decisions and are not constrained to be merely ‘implementers of others’ agendas’ (Mayer and Mills 2021, 56).

Taking a cultural memory approach to English teachers’ professional learning provides insight into what Brass and Holloway (2021) call a ‘genealogy of teacher professionalism’ (521). As a profession, we have not always thought about professional learning the way we are encouraged to think about it now. Having access to the memories of longstanding English teachers provides a critical vantage point from which to view contemporary understandings. In her work on different forms of professionalism, Evetts (2011) notes that in the shift to managerial models, the sense of a ‘shared normative end’ (409) is being replaced by external measures of performance. In teaching, this is rationalised as ‘performance-as-care’, where the ethical agency of teachers is replaced with performance and compliance. The normative dimensions of teaching are divorced from practice, draining professional learning of its potential as a site of praxis.

Activities that enact ‘care of the profession’ are surviving, even if they are not represented in official discourses of professional learning and engagement. ‘Care of the profession’ represents a significant component of the viability of the social fabric of a teaching life. The implications are that teacher education and ongoing professional learning should orient teachers to forms of professional engagement that enhance opportunities to deliberate with colleagues about the ways, means and purposes of practice. Care remains an essential component of education and teachers need the scope to express their care beyond performance and compliance. Crucially, care can be the basis of engaging in struggles over the directions of schooling, as is evident in Carla’s story of leading professional learning in times of educational reform and change. Indeed, democratic professionalism is one of the goods that ‘care of the profession’ seeks. Care can be misused, but it can also be vital in generating an agentive and critically engaged professional identity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.