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Professionals were once considered to be the civic leaders, the deliverers of the - society However, the old order has cracked under the pressure of social change, leaving a very different relation between professionals and their publics. This paper addresses some of the questions occasioned by these changes. Where does the altered pours relation between parents, students and teachers leave the notion of teacher professionalism? What is the role of professionals within the emergent order? The paper is a product of the ESRC-funded New Forms of Education Management Project (Local Governance Programme) It argues that, within the new management of education, the professional codes and practices point to a changing relation between teachers and what has traditionally been seen as their specialist knowledge. An outcome of this altered relation is the empowerment of parents and students in relation to teachers However, the new relation depends upon new shared understandings and new sets of agreement-making and these in turn depend upon new processes of agreement-making and a radically altered power relation between parents, students and teachers as they jointly develop these processes The paper reviews the changing purposes of professionalism during the second half of the 20th century and outlines a new version of teacher professionality based upon the enabling of learning, the accommodation of difference, and the practice of agreement Agreement is then 'theorised' in terms of the nature of agreement and the institutional structuring of agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of bricolage, as it is developed by Levi-Strauss, is useful in characterising the form of teacher's work, it subsumes extensive research on the form of teacher's work and provides a heuristic device for developing causal explanations of the form of teachers' work as well as drawing together and unifying explanations developed in the literature. This assists and informs interventions to promote progressive pedagogy. The paper begins with an account of bricolage and its relationship to a science of pedagogy Next,features of teachers' work which push it toward bricolage are discussed, viz. Conservatism, limited creativity, repertoire enlargement, teacher' use of theory, the use of devious means, and ad hocism. Causal explanations of various of these features are discussed, viz. anticipatory socialization, aspects of preservice teacher education experiences and constraints in the work situation. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for teacher education of taking seriously the suggestion that teachers' work is bricolage and taking seriously the associated causal explanations. It is argued that a critical starting point for progressive change in educational practice is the provision of inservice for tertiary educators who may themselves be bricoleurs. Without this, the significant necessary changes to preservice student's on-campus and within school experiences are unlikely to be supported or legitimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the argument is made that forms of consciousness, knowledge, sentiments and values that teachers use as part of their cultural repertoires in schools are the result of social constitution The `social' is composed of a number of overlapping discourses that are characteristic of schools everywhere `Teacher culture' is a signifier for the production and consumption of these discourses Recent trends to emphasise the plurality of teacher culture(s) are countered by a review of work that suggests more uniformity in teacher culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]