Full Description
This book presents eight distinctive historical chapters that explore the complex relationship between politics, professionals and practitioners in a range of different educational contexts. It offers a timely contribution to current debates about the contested place and status of educational professionalism in modern society. It is grounded in a firm commitment to the value that a historical perspective might bring to current and recurrent educational concerns, of which educational professionalism remains key.
With fresh examples from nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century education, as well as a diversity of methodological approaches and sources, the book addresses a range of fundamental questions about educational professionalism. These include the wider politics of professionalism; issues of professional knowledge and expertise; what and who counts as professional within various power discourses; professional training, socialisation and accreditation; and professional identities, power, agency, autonomy regulation, accountability, and control. Overall, there is a sense from these chapters that there is something fractured and disconnected in current discourses around educational professionalism, but that there have been particular moments in the past when there was the promise of something different and possibly something more authentic. Moving beyond a narrow focus on schoolteachers as professional practitioners, to embrace a wider conceptualisation of educational professionalism within higher education, the churches, educational leadership, and quasi-professional and voluntary organisations, the book represents a rich and novel contribution to the field.
The chapters in this book were originally published in various issues of History of Education and the British Journal of Religious Education.
Contents
Introduction: Politics, professionals and practitioners 1. Can we still speak of there being an academic profession? 2. Intellectual portraits: politics, professions and identity in twentieth-century England 3. Context, curriculum and professional knowledge 4. Knowledge, character and professionalization in nineteenth-century British science 5. Reconstructing the life histories of Spanish primary school teachers: a novel approach for the study of the teaching profession and school culture 6. Re-shaping teacher identity? The Liverpool Teachers' Centre 1973-1976 7. 'That great educational experiment': the City of London Vacation Course in Education 1922-1938: a forgotten story in the history of teacher professional development 8. Conceptualising and researching the professionalisation of Religious Education teachers: historical and international perspectives
