Search

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’. This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 London-based secondary teacher training students from various social class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper asks how the profession is perceived and what sort of choice it is for the trainees. It employs a Bourdieusian lens and concepts of social and cultural capital to examine the interplay of gendered, classed and ‘raced’ biographies in relation to individuals’ decisions to become teachers. Understanding the social world as ‘accumulated history’, as Bourdieu does, stresses that experiences and outcomes are rooted and collected in a series of historical structures and functionings. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of the profession is both a function and an effect of its conceptualisation as feminised. It also asks whether the weak professional standing of teaching has further destabilising consequences in the present political moment where a string of neoliberal and neoconservative policy reforms reshape the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on research from a small-scale project investigating the vocational training of students in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in England. We draw on data from interviews with 42 students and five tutors in order to explore the students’ understandings of professionalism in early years. In the paper, we discuss first, the then Labour Government’s drive to ‘professionalise’ the workforce and second, critically analyse the concept of professionalism, drawing on sociological literature. We then turn to the data, and argue that students’ understandings of professionalism are limited to generic understandings of ‘professional’ behaviour (reliability, politeness, punctuality and so on). The idea of their occupation being a repository of a particular knowledge and skills set is undercut by the students’ emphasis on work with young children being largely a matter of ‘common sense’. Our fourth point is to highlight the processes by which students are inducted into a respectable and responsible carer identity, as illustrated by an emphasis on clothes and appearance. We conclude that the version of professionalism offered to students training at this level is highly constrained, and discuss the implications of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the example of what is now known in a large part of the Anglo-saxon world as the boys' underachievement debate, this paper explores the construction of gender issues, which underpins educational policies in England and France. It argues that the formation of particular questions as 'policy issues' bears limited relation to what happens on the ground, yet is contingent on societal contexts. For example, while England and France share similar patterns in terms of the differential achievement of boys and girls, in the former the boys' underachievement debate is prominent, but in the latter it is non-existent. This supports the view that the emergence of the boys' underachievement debate is not related to a 'grounded reality'. Rather, the debate appears embedded in the discursive construction of gender and education and, more generally, of notions of citizenship and equality/difference. These findings provide a strong case in favour of a reflexive approach to equality matters in educational policy making. They also suggest that the analysis of what is constructed as a key issue in policy circles represents a rich terrain for feminist analysis, and they highlight that national frameworks continue to structure the thinking on equality issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]