In this essay I discuss
the nature of teaching and the circumstances of teachers' work and lives. It
was written as a submission to the 2020 Inquiry Valuing the Teaching
Profession, sponsored by the NSW Teachers' Federation. The essay builds on
recent debates and writing about teachers, on my experience as a researcher
concerned with school education, and on what I have learned as a teacher in the
tertiary sector.
Teachers'
Worth
Teachers'
cultural position
In graduation
ceremonies for Education degrees, the invited speaker often includes a fanfare
for the teaching profession, telling the graduands they are bearers of cultural
traditions, mentors of the rising generation and gatekeepers to the future.
These ideas sound like clichés, but they are not just boilerplate. Teachers do
have a central role in the culture.
Ever since mass
school systems became a reality, teachers have been the main agents for the
growth of literacy, the formation of skilled and professional workforces, the
broad dissemination of sciences and humanities, and a large part of young
people's social learning. Teachers' work underpins our society's achievements
in public health, economic and technological development, literature, music and
art. In a society with many regional, ethnic and religious differences,
teachers' work in schools is essential for social connection and cohesion. The
role is so broad and so important that when social troubles emerge, politicians
and journalists often blame teachers for causing the problems, or require teachers
to fix them.
In social-science discussions,
teaching is sometimes defined as the archetypal 'new profession'. School teachers
are trained knowledge workers, now usually with university degrees. They are unionized,
wage-earning rather than fee-earning, employees rather than self-employed, mainly
working in the public sector, with high proportions of women and entrants from
working-class backgrounds. All these points have to be qualified in detail, but
they are broadly correct. Teachers as a group not only perform important tasks
for society but have themselves been significant players in economic and social
change.
Teaching is in one
sense the best-known profession of all. In a society where almost every child
goes to school, almost every adult has had a close-up view of teachers doing
their daily work - or at least, part of it. Many adults hold great affection
for particular teachers who were important in their lives. But other memories
may be negative, even angry. Many people also imagine, from a limited
knowledge, that teaching is an easy job with short hours and long holidays,
something that anyone could do, only needing quick-and-dirty training. The
public image of teachers is genuinely complicated.
Teaching as
work
If you enter ‘teachers’
and ‘work’ together into the widely-used bibliographical database Google
Scholar you will find over four million references in the English language
alone. There are two hundred and eighty thousand references if you use the
phrase ‘teachers' work’ as an exact search term. I would judge that at most a
thousand items, perhaps less, form the core research-based literature. The
larger figures illustrate how widely discussed teachers and their work are, and
how frequently questions about teachers connect with other educational issues,
from curriculum to public policy, assessment, and pedagogical method.
The sociology of
work speaks of the 'labour process', which means not only which tasks the
worker performs, but also, crucially, how these tasks are organized. Three
features of the teaching labour process are crucial. Teaching is interpersonal,
composite, and unbounded. Forgive the jargon, I'll explain.
(a) Teaching always involves connections
between people: it consists of human encounters. These may be intense or
formal, short or sustained, one-to-one or one-to-many, even some-to-many (in
team-teaching). Whatever their form, the element of encounter is always there. Encounter
is interactive. Pure top-down instruction
is part, but only a minimal part, of actual teaching.
To play an
effective role in someone else's learning, the teacher must learn what the
pupil's current capacities and motivations are, and what the pupil needs to take
the next step in learning. Then again, for the step after that; and so on. The
teacher's capacity to learn about the pupils is a crucial element in
teaching, perhaps the most important element of all in effective teaching. The
more diverse the cohort of pupils, the greater the professional demand upon the
teacher in sustaining the pupils' learning.
(b) Teaching is a composite labour
process. Close-focus ethnographic research in schools has made this clear. Any
teacher giving a detailed account of a working day could demonstrate it too! In
day-to-day classroom time, teachers do multiple forms of work, often switching
very fast between them and sometimes doing several tasks at once.
Classroom work
includes the complex intellectual labour of understanding the pupils and
transforming the curriculum into classroom practice; this is the most easily
recognized part of the job. But the job also requires (as more recent studies
emphasise) emotional labour: creating connection with class members through
shared interest, encouragement, humour and sometimes anger; keeping focus in
the classroom by managing pupils' boredom, excitement or distraction; dealing
with conflict in the class and the effects of tension and trauma in the pupils'
lives. As well as the intellectual and emotional labour, the teacher also has
significant classroom administration: keeping records, managing equipment,
providing materials, administering tests. It seems that the administrative labour
has increased in the last few decades, with growing official requirements for
testing and other forms of documentation. On top of all this are tasks outside
the classroom. These are also varied, requiring a range of skills: preparation
of classes, supervision in break times, organizing sports, arts and hobby
groups, arranging and supervising events, speaking with parents, reading
official circulars, participating in staff meetings, attending in-service
programmes, and so on.
(c) Partly because of the
interactive and composite nature of the labour process, teaching is difficult
to keep within bounds. Some of the job goes home in the briefcase at the end of
the day: reports to write, assignments to mark, lessons to prepare. Some of the
job goes home in one's head: the knots and tangles of classroom life, the
pupils who are slipping behind for no apparent reason, the thrills and
successes in the teaching process.
All this is hard to
limit, since teachers know that what they do affects their pupils' lives, just
as the Graduation Day speech said. The legendary ‘first year out’ (which may
take more than one year) is a baptism of fire for many young teachers because
of the workload and the emotional demands. Later on, even highly engaged and
successful teachers may find they burn out. There is a cumulative effect of the
complexity and pressure. To survive in the long run, teachers have to find a
balance between over-commitment and self-protection. Support from colleagues is
important in finding this balance.
Workforce and
situation
Though mass media
images of teachers emphasise colourful individuals, good or bad (the movie Dead
Poets Society has both), no teacher really works alone. As with many other
forms of labour, in teaching most effects are produced by the workforce as a
whole. Any teacher in her classroom is building on the work of all the teachers
who have worked with those pupils before. What happens in the classroom is
shaped by what happens in the next-door classroom and by the routines of the whole
school, the discussion and planning that happens in staff meetings, the
engagement of school principals and senior teachers, the daily work of office
and maintenance staff, the constant informal discussions and exchange of
information that happens in staffrooms and around the school office. Researchers
recognize this when they speak of schools as organizations and try to
characterise school culture, climate or atmosphere.
Beyond each
particular school is all the work of other schools, as well as system
administrators, curriculum developers, specialist support staff, assessment
authorities, teacher organizations, and teacher educators. The work of all
these groups frames what happens in any individual classroom. Education on a
mass scale, in a large public school system, can only happen because the work
is done by this whole workforce - the ‘collective worker’ in the jargon of
industrial sociology. Each person's labour is dependent on, and supported by,
the labour of many others.
It is not
surprising that attempts to measure teacher effectiveness on an individual
basis run into trouble. The German sociologist Claus Offe showed half a century
ago the fundamental flaw in attempts to measure individual or even occupational-group
productivity as a basis for wage determination in large-scale modern
organizations, and this applies to education systems.
Across a large
school system, teachers must deal with varied groups of pupils. One school is
located in a quiet, mostly White suburb with a high proportion of professionals
and managers, while another is in a crowded, multi-ethnic city area with a high
proportion of recent migrants. Another is in a depressed rural area with high youth
unemployment and very few resident professionals; and so on. Some of the
students will be academically engaged, others in conflict with the school. In
any age group there will be students with disabilities, behaviour problems and
complex wellbeing needs.
I won't dwell on
what everyone knows about inequality in Australia, but I do think it is
important to recognize that social inequalities are educational issues.
Poverty and wealth, remoteness, urban conditions, ethnic and religious
difference, indigenous or settler background, physical difference and
disability - all these confront teachers with different conditions and
combinations of tasks in different schools. Private schools are able to choose
how much diversity they care to accommodate. But it is the nature of a public
education system that all groups of students must be included and
supported. The demands on teachers' professionalism and learning capacities are
greater.
We have long known
that in education, formal equality of provision does not mean equality of
outcomes. In Australia we have an unfortunate history of segregated public and
private school systems. The cynical
political strategy of diverting public funds to support private schooling for
the more privileged makes our educational problems worse. One of the damaging
things it does is to divide the teaching workforce, creating separate career
paths which limit rather than enrich professional experience.
New pressures
Teachers and their
work have long been subject to controls of various kinds: religious, political,
managerial and professional. Not far back in history, teachers were expected to
show rigid conservatism in dress, manners and attitudes, in private life as
well as working hours. Some of this has changed, as teachers asserted their citizen
rights. But teachers can still be targeted in moral panics, as the right-wing campaign
against the Safe Schools programme in Australia showed. Contemporary concerns
about sexual abuse of children have required teachers to observe more
restrictive rules about physical contact with pupils in everyday school life.
In the last few
decades new means of regulation of teachers' work have developed, generally
involving control at a distance. This is euphemistically called ‘accountability’.
On-line templates and information systems, heavier and more detailed reporting
requirements, standardized testing on a huge scale, quantitative targets and
incentives, are now familiar in the education sector. Individual schools and
teachers are supposed to have easily-measured goals and are made individually
responsible for achieving them, as if schools were Dickensian firms counting up
their cash. School league tables are now familiar, such as those constructed
from the appalling MySchool website (‘supports national transparency and
accountability’ according to its front page, giving the game away). This system
constantly confronts teachers with tension between government demands for competitive
standardized testing, and the need of the students for assessment tailored to
their actual learning situations and patterns of growth.
Education systems have
been subjected to requirements imported from other industries, with little
attention to their educational effects. Competition, privatisation,
accountability, managerial prerogative and market choice are now the common
sense of corporate managers and form the dominant language of public policy, in
Australia as overseas. They have been powerfully reinforced by the
globalization agenda of the World Bank and the rich countries' economic think
tank the OECD (which now administers the PISA global testing system for schools
- how did Education Ministers let that happen?).
There is growing
evidence about the impact of new technology on teachers' work. These changes
are often hyped as modernization flowing from technological innovation. this is
of course the view of the tech companies. Computers and the internet do offer many
possibilities for enrichment of teaching and learning of new skills. Whether
these possibilities are realized is another matter. ICT in education must also
be seen in the context of changing management practices and the rise of
corporations that sell textbooks, curriculum materials, tests, journals and
management templates. There is formidable pressure here to standardize teaching
practices, discourage the messiness of experimentation and local engagement,
and re-shape teaching as a measurable technical performance rather than a
complex human encounter. A few decades ago, we laughed at the insulting idea of
a 'teacher-proof curriculum'. We should laugh no more, as current ICT and
corporate strategies make it more feasible to reduce the skills of
teachers, while still maintaining a facade of performance.
Careers and
lives
In education,
situations and responses change over time, sometimes quite dramatically. This
is brought out in histories of school systems, biographies of educators, and
research on teaching careers. Research about careers often suggests that
teachers move through definite stages. They are supposed to pass from initial
career choice, through initial training, to the first year out, adjusting to
the real world of teaching, developing technique and acquiring experience,
specializing, gaining advancement and promotion, and eventual retirement. These
things do happen, of course! But the closer the focus, the more complex the
changes appear, and the less fixed the stages. It would be unrealistic to tie
teacher's salaries and conditions to a rigid model of stages in career
development. We should be glad that there can be changes of direction, false
starts, experiments and unorthodox pathways in the teaching workforce.
One reason for the
complexity of careers is teachers' lives outside school. Work/life balance can
be very problematic for beginning teachers, given the pressures of the first
year out. Forming families and households may come at the same time as starting
professional life. In Australian society work/life balance is constructed
mainly as a dilemma for women, given the long-standing gender inequalities in
the load of housework and child- and elder-care (little changed even in the
COVID-19 lockdowns). We should be alert to the way apparently 'family-friendly'
policies may actually reinforce these inequalities.
Teaching as an
occupation does not escape gender divisions. Women predominate in early
childhood and primary teaching, secondary teaching is more balanced, men
predominate at the upper levels of university teaching and in senior
management. In sectors where teaching is organized by subject areas, men
predominate in physical sciences and engineering-related fields, women in
humanities, social sciences and performing arts. These gender divisions become
an equity issue within the profession if the teaching of younger children is
seen as less skilled work than the teaching of older students - for which I can
see no warrant at all - or if government concerns to boost STEM studies turn
into wage/promotion incentives.
Fifty years ago we
could have said that entry to the teaching profession in Australia was
overwhelmingly from White Anglophone backgrounds, but also that it provided
upward mobility for a significant group of working-class entrants. More
students from both Aboriginal communities and non-Anglophone migrant
communities have now come through teacher education and into the profession,
the public sector probably changing faster than the private sector. But with
the end of teaching scholarships and the rise of university fees and student
debt, the sources of recruitment may become more restricted in social-class
terms. If we value communication and sharing of experience across a diverse
population, then having a socially representative teaching workforce seems an
important goal.
In conclusion
Teachers as a
group, rather than individually, have a formative role in social and economic
processes. The central purpose of their labour is to help the rising generation
develop their intellectual, social, practical and creative capacities, a task
that is simultaneously vital, elusive and fantastically complex. Teachers have
to deploy a wide range of their own capacities - intellectual and emotional, manual,
creative and practical - to do the job. Though pupils encounter teachers as
individuals, the work is in fact strongly collective and powerfully shaped by
the institutional system. It is no wonder that teachers' public image is
contradictory and that governments often reach for showy short-term solutions
to tough long-term educational problems.
Teachers today have
to deal with changing technologies as well as shifting policies and management
practices. In their daily work they face the consequences of declining support
for human services, as they deal with diverse and changing school populations,
the effects of migration, economic inequality and social trauma, and the needs
in pupils' lives produced by colonization, racism, family violence,
disabilities and community conflicts. It is an impressive sign of teacher
professionalism that so much good teaching actually happens in our public schools.
