General introduction

1. Conflicting Conceptions of the Teachers Role in Educational Change

The focus on change in the title reminds us that teachers and schools are increasingly subject to reformist policies as governments seek to enhance human capital in the face of globalized competition. Pressures for school reform have intensified as national and multinational test scores become part of the political debates about productivity and the globalization of educational objectives. Teachers work is evaluated as never before: measures of teacher capacity are gathered; international studies assess outcomes. These data are used to advance theoretical and political agendas that imply images of teacher professional practice as much they do of student achievement.

It is now commonplace for policy makers and researchers to use data from sources like the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) to compare outcomes of educational systems and monitor the quality of schooling world-wide. For example, results of the recent Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (Beaton et al., 1996) have resulted in a flood of public discussion about apparently ineffective schools and in demands for improvement in Mathematics and Science teaching and learning. In countries like Germany or the USA, where TIMSS results were seen as inadequate, national programs urge schools to change teaching methods, modify subject matter, and increase the amount of assessment.

We can see in recent reforms - such as those documented in the recent OECD studies (Black and Atkin, 1996; Raizen and Britton, 1997) - diverse approaches to change, ranging from support of self-development for school cultures and promoting teacher development and practice, to systems of imposed policies directed by educational objectives. Whatever the reform intentions from outside schools are, it is clear that they are modified by teachers as they enact those intentions; often quite radically (Tyack and Cuban, 1995; Westbury, 1995). The teaching profession, we know, cannot hide behind arcane rituals and antique language. These, increasingly, are challenged by accountability measures adopted by governments, yet consensus about what goals education should seek is absent.

Strident reform ideologies, disappointing scores on international tests for some and a climate of distrust of professionals generally (Schön, 1983), to mention only a few trends, challenge teachers to account for themselves. As a consequence, attention increasingly is drawn to concepts of self-development, self-assessment, human deliberation, reflective practice or collaborative partnership that support their professional efforts for quality of practice. In this context, human values, beliefs and moral considerations get special attention in the evaluation of good teaching practice.

Unfortunately reforms usually are not based on the insights teachers have achieved from practice over time, as a recent OECD study has underscored (Black and Atkin, 1996). While governments might be concerned about learning outcomes and their political consequences and thus call for reform, little will be accomplished if teachers do not understand and support these reforms. Proposed strategies for change seem limited to the following alternatives: impose change and hope for a related commitment or rely on teacher self-development. The first approach - the "enforced scenario" - assumes commitment that might be achieved if "accompanied by tutoring and tenderness". This is the conclusion drawn from a comparative study on school improvement in the USA (Huberman and Miles, 1989, p. 279). They suggest that without tutoring "administrative pressure without support and commitment simply leads to teacher resistance and failure". Tutoring or not the change comes from above as a mandate.

In the "self-development" model, change is dependent on teachers' professional commitment for school improvement. This commitment is not necessarily present everywhere and is not always identical with official policies of innovation. Teachers' sense and sensibility for professional commitment and ethics may be sharpened (Terhart, 1998). But it cannot be prescribed, because the professional commitment must occur from inside as Ewald Terhart notes in Chapter 1.

Educational administrators however, start to understand the dynamics of self-development as schools are asked to develop their own programs for raising standards of learning and teaching, programs are established for financial support and networks for exchange and research are developed as a participative and collaborative enterprise. But what is needed in addition to these programs is a radically different idea about teachers' role in change and ultimately radically different images of teacher as professionals.

We see both, the enforcement and the self-development model at work in the papers that follow reflecting this diversity of thinking about change and teachers' role. The effects of these models are compared in the study of different national reform projects by Manfred Lang and colleagues. Cases of imposed national curriculum with negative results are analyzed in the contributions of Maureen Pope and Pam Poppleton and their colleagues. A case of imposed change with positive outcomes in Ontario is described by Ann Marie Hill. Here the commitment of students made the difference.

While there are examples of change through enforcement, change through self-development is assumed in the majority of contributions. Karl-Oswald Bauer, and similarly Andrea Peter, present a model in Chapter 5 which places the professional self at the centre of educational change. Bauer defines the professional self as a result of personal growth in the context of educational work and social interaction with colleagues and clients. He conceives the self as a system of professional values, occupational and subject knowledge and language and action repertoires. The value dimension he points to is taken up in detail in the discussion of moral aspects of professionalism in Chapter 2. The role of subject knowledge in professional development is treated by Klaus-Henning Hansen in Chapter 3. Sources of professional knowledge, especially that coming from student feedback, are considered by Jean Rudduck and Max van Manen in Chapter 1. The role colleagues play in self-development is discussed by Huber and his colleagues in Chapter 4.

Teachers are not working in isolation. Those who work with them are caught up in the reform process. The professional self is developed in a community of persons involved in teaching and learning as colleagues, students, researchers, teacher educators, administrators, parents or politicians in an environment of openness, mutual help, trust and understanding. But there are also many pressures from diverse of stake holders. Many and conflicting good intentions exist for schools driven often by insecurities which flow from international testing and changes in the workplace. Conservative forces want productivity measures - liberal and socially oriented groups want autonomous and self-responsible developments and there is much in between. These many good intentions have the power to influence teacher practice. The means are embodied in curricula, syllabi, standards, financial incentives, school structures, teachers' and students' assessment systems, textbooks and computer purchases.

Researchers, no less than others, contest the nature of education and its assumed contribution to a good life, and all involved have a point of view and an agenda. What these are is much in evidence in research within ISATT- often associated with questions of teacher development and school reform. It is not surprising that research on teaching often is done by those who work with teachers in professional development. Both share a common cause and to some extent a common language - the improvement of practice. Each is able to know the other. Research on teaching has been much based on and framed by this symbiotic relationship between teacher educators and teachers.

 

The changing nature of this relationship is one of the themes we consider. Teachers always have had an ambiguous relationship with the institution of the school. Control over their work ebbs and flows and we find now that controls are much in evidence as nations play for stakes in the global marketplace and the rhetoric of liberal economic theory occupies the centre of educational debate and often suborns its language and researchers play an increasingly important role in policy making. These challenges to educational provision meet the profession across a broad front.

In many countries, teacher educators are no longer the main gatekeepers to the profession. Teacher assessment is now commonplace, yet the nature of teacher expertise is contested by theorists. Are the foundations which are now used to assess teachers so foundational? How is the profession to be judged, many ask (Shulman, 1987; Sockett, 1987; Sockett, 1993; Jackson et al., 1993; Yinger and Hendriks-Lee, 1998).

The demands on the teaching profession are manifold. Reform pedagogies stress student interests and conceptions based on constructivist theories. Teachers are no longer so central in setting classroom agendas. The list of the challenges to the profession is long and we shall examine some of the forces which are causing educators to rethink the nature of the profession - its knowledge and wisdom. What follows reflects the ongoing debate about what teachers know and profess. Wilson (1962) reminded us over three decades ago, and Jackson (1986) more recently, that the intellectual and affective demands of the role are but little delimited and the expectations of stakeholders for what schools can do often overly grand. The teachers' role also is conflicted by its commitments to intellectual discipline - to meeting objective standards - and at the same to giving all students encouragement and affection. Who, we might ask, would take on such a task? Only one with a vocation, as Hansen (1995) and Tomlinson (1998) remind us.

Change presses in on teachers from two directions: from researchers with reform agendas based on social science theory, and from government policy based on economic ideologies to do with globalization and the role of government itself. Teachers are asked increasingly to offer students more individualized and individualistic instruction, but with fewer resources, or with resources which require new skills such as accessing the internet. The point of view of the students is increasingly sought in research and in recommendations for practice. What role can the student voice play in teacher professional development?

Teachers are expected, increasingly, to act as clinicians and managers of new technologies as they implement rapidly changing educational policies. They are asked to reflect on their practice but rarely are they on the inside when change agendas are formulated. Neither are they in receipt of resources which would enable them to fully participate in reflection. Teachers are outsiders in this process often enough to cause concern.

The practical demands of the job are changing; so are educational objectives. Educational objectives increasingly stress individualistic competitive advantage at the expense of commitment to collective welfare. Taylor (1991) points to this disturbing trend towards an individualistic framework for educational goals. He notes that there are dangers in this trend. He says: "The agent seeking significance in life...has to exist in a horizon of important questions ...What is self-defeating ... (is) self-fulfilment in opposition to the demands of society" (p.104).

Market rhetoric is sufficiently present in educational debate worldwide to make us ask what role does the teaching profession play in this globalizing process. Where does this fit with traditional ideals of the profession? What are the challenges here to the moral foundations of the practice? Teaching is a moral enterprise - not only defined by skill and craft in production - the activities we now see measured - but also by the worth of what is learned and the manner of its learning. When we talk about a good teacher we do not mean just an efficient or compliant teacher, but a person who is able to consider what is good and pursue that. As MacIntyre (1984) reminds us it takes certain virtues to become a teacher. He points out that a practice gets better because people are willing to take criticism (honesty) from those they recognize as fit to give it (fairness), and are willing to act on that criticism (courage). Being honest, fair and courageous are virtues. Because of such virtues, he argues, it becomes possible to learn from experience. Where do such professional virtues fit with images of teacher practice embedded in curriculum development and teacher assessment?

Take, for example, the image of teacher as manager which is embodied in the idea of teacher expertise - a widespread idea in educational rhetoric. This concept of expertise is ill founded, MacIntyre argues, because claims to expertise are based on: "What purports to be objectively grounded claims... but are expressions of arbitrary will and preference ...The expert is fatally undermined when we recognize that there is no stock of law like generalizations ...The concept of managerial effectiveness is...moral fiction" (p. 107).

The issue of professionalism arises, as we have seen, across a broad front, in relation to educational ideals, curriculum change, teacher and student assessment, classroom practice, and professional development. As we see it, the following questions arise from the contributions that follow:

1.What are teachers being exhorted to do as professionals in order to cope with expectations placed on schools?

2. What do such expectations and the way they are framed and implemented imply for teacher professional standards?

3. From where can teachers gather knowledge useful for professional development?

4.What can teachers do to enhance their collective ability to critique, enhance and defend those standards?

5. What role do teachers play in curriculum development? What opportunities are there for professional development; for research?

6. What resources exist within the profession to develop the knowledge and capacity to reflect on reform agendas. What partnerships would be productive ? How well are professional virtues nurtured in practice?

7. How can teachers participate in the research/policy process?

Before we move into specific cases, we need to look at the concept of professionalism itself? Where do these contributions take us? Changes in policy, research questions and school practice, as we saw, challenge existing definitions of professionalism. Bond (1996), for example, has defined professionalism with reference to elements such as: social acceptable practices and skills, autonomy, monopoly of certain kinds of knowledge and flexibility in practice. Professionalism also involves the socialization of practitioners through career development and changes in social expectation (Margolis et al., 1998; Oevermann ,1996). While issues of autonomy and socialization are addressed in what follows, attention is also given to the development of the professional self within a moral frame of responsibility, care and partnership; the nature of which we touched on briefly above.

The question of professionalism has always been a thorny one for teaching: when compared to medicine and law teachers have often been assigned to the status of a semi-profession. The degree of independence and specialized knowledge deemed necessary to qualify as a profession is said to be absent in teaching. Yet teachers are asked to take charge of the development of the young from an early age and over many years. It is an onerous responsibility. Teachers do this work largely unsupervised and mostly according to their own lights, efforts to manage their work through curriculum and supervision not withstanding. Given the autonomy that teachers have de facto, the highly responsible work they do and the skill that is needed to do it, it is hard not to say that these people are professionals for just those very reasons.

A defining element of the professional is the knowledge deployed in practice. Where do teachers find guidance and direction for their work? We would argue that they find this from the pedagogical traditions that have evolved in the profession, which are based on the didactical thought about the curriculum that has developed over time and has been subjected to tests in practice making use of negative feedback from classroom experience (Olson, James, Lang, 1998). Teachers learn much - more than we realize - from their students, as Jean Rudduck and van Manen point out below. Their analysis of the contribution the student voice can make to the development of teacher capacity is based on the powerful idea that the classroom is rich in opportunity to try different approaches to teaching and to learn from experience - and from students, especially. The classroom is a proving ground sine qua non. Good teachers learn from their mistakes if they possess virtues - such as those pointed to above - needed to confront what they learn about themselves in practice.

The ability to reflect on what has been attempted in the classroom - which we see as central to the improvement of the profession - cannot be imposed as Ewald Terhart will later maintain. The fact that teachers learn from experience is often ignored in criticisms which maintain that the profession lacks an adequate knowledge base for practice. Support for this view comes from comparisons made between medicine and teaching. Medicine, for example, it is argued, goes forward with a scientific base; teaching does not. Yet research on other professional practice suggests that others work as much by tacit knowledge as by applied science (Polanyi, 1958; Schön, 1983; Benner, 1984; Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986). They have found that it depends on the circumstances of practice what the balance will be between intuition and the use of a scientific calculus. The same could be said of teachers. Teachers also are said to lack social-scientific knowledge; a claim usually made by social scientists themselves. Such claims misunderstand the complex nature of practice involving whole people in complex and ambiguous situations; what teachers know is underestimated (Olson 1992; Eraut, 1994, Tomlinson 1998).

Yet the problem remains that what teachers know is inadequately expressed and shared both within the profession and without. Inadequate opportunity has existed for teachers to develop expressions of practice which can be used to advance analysis and critique of educational policy - to make the tacit explicit, as Karl-Oswald Bauer will urge, and thus be more able to take part in the political process, as Ewald Terhart suggests below. One of the realities of the work which limits the full scope of professional improvement, is the difficulty teachers have in learning from each other. This is an issue that Maureen Pope and her colleagues point to. Later we look at examples of ways in which these barriers to collaboration have been overcome.

Part of the problem is that teachers often do not have control of professional development agendas. These are too often lead by bureaucratic directives which may have little to do with classroom problems. We see how this is so in the context of curriculum reform in which teachers are urged to collaborate with colleagues and to develop the skill of reflective practice. Calls for increased collaboration and reflective practice presuppose that useful feedback is available about the effects of this or that practice; this or that innovation. Gathering feedback can be a risky process. Teaching involves high ego risk - the teacher is on stage in a very visible way and is routinely criticized by laity and expert alike. Gathering useful negative feedback is psychically and practically difficult yet it is clear that it needs to be done (Olson, James, Lang, 1998).

The need to gather critical data raises questions about the research which must be undertaken to allow teachers to analyze practice realistically and play a convincing role in debates about policy. The research that is needed involves teachers at all steps along the way. Indeed there exists a strong movement to place teacher front and centre in this research process. Is this feasible? What then of the role of the outside researcher?

Gunnel Colnerud and her colleagues take up the question of the role of the researcher in working with teachers to develop an ethical praxis. They point to the danger that researchers will try to prescribe what teacher practice ought to be. As we see it - in the guise of what might be called "best practice" descriptions end up being prescriptions without rationale (Clark, 1991, Olson, 1992). Claiming to know what best practice is - a claim common in business rhetoric - or to recognize expertise in teaching - which comes to the same thing, simply begs the question of wherein lies the claim to superiority. This is the morally fictitious sleight of hand that MacIntyre points to, as we noted above.

Karl-Oswald Bauer, and Andrea Peter look at the role of the teacher as researcher into that practice. Bauer suggests that "a professional self arises from the critical preoccupation with one‘s own incompleteness which has been recognized and experienced as changeable" (p. 199). He points to the danger of accepting incompleteness and blaming external circumstances for it. The other danger is to deny incompleteness. Bauer in saying this underscores the point made earlier about the need for teacher to gather critical feedback about practice and to have the courage to confront that. The research role of the teacher is bound up with the nature of the professional self. Bauer suggests that the teacher must adopt the role of the a critical observer to assist in this process - a role which we cannot assume will be easily achieved. How are teachers to achieve this capacity?

Andrea Peter points to the classroom as a place of experimentation in which teacher knowledge and beliefs take the form of practice. If the classroom situation is perceived as problematic, she suggests, then the opportunity opens for experimentation. She says that external influences have a role to pay in promoting the idea that practice is problematical; especially professional development projects in which teachers are able to experiment with teaching ideas and discuss them with peers. The idea is to create conditions in which the practice can be seen as problematical. such a process asks the teacher to undertake research into practice within a supportive climate.

 

2. How can Change Lead to Professional Growth?

   Using classroom research and reflection for professional development is not a smooth process. Teachers are not always in the position to take a critical detached view of change. Often they are asked to implement practices that are mandated from outside - practices they had little or no role in formulating and which may be difficult for them to implement. The role of the teacher is conflicted: the teacher is called both to implement required practices but at the same time to take a critical interest in them both in theory and practice. How do these conflicts arise? What can teachers do to enhance their professionalism in the light of the challenges to their practice which flow from rapid change? Such questions are in mind as we look at the structure of the chapters that follow.

   In the first chapter Ewald Terhart and Marianne Horstkemper raise questions about the sources of teacher professionalism. Ewald Terhart notes the tensions which vex teacher development: How can teachers be mandated to develop as professionals when we know that that process must occur inside them and - we can say - inside the profession itself? He urges teachers to become part of the debate about modernity and the changing roles of citizens. He looks to the profession to develop a political voice.

   Marianne Horstkemper picks up the political theme by looking at the role women have played and can play as a force for change in the profession. She notes that women have insight into the relational work of the school-work needed more than ever as young people feel more alienated. Like Ewald Terhart, she sees these social trends as inevitably pressing on the school and requiring a response. Women, she shows, can play an important role in responding to this professional challenge.

   Jean Rudduck and Max van Manen are also concerned about sources of professional knowledge and wisdom. In their studies of student perspectives on school life, Jean Rudduck and her colleagues found that students experience the transitions in schools as baffling. What do schools mean by hard work? they ask. Why do not schools make provision for their autonomy. Students know what hard work is outside school - they experience autonomy there. Neither seems the same in schools. Schools seem unable to communicate what is valuable: the moral context is opaque. She argues that relationships between teachers and students need to change. This is a call to teachers to rethink the sources of their practical knowledge.

   Max van Manen takes up this same theme - what teachers can learn from how students experience school. He asks: "What do students tell us about who we are as teachers?" More than reflect on practice - as is now the current nostrum - he urges that teachers listen to their students and put themselves in their place. Acts of imagination are needed - not just reflection; teachers need to watch over themselves teach. He, along with the other writers, asks schools to consider what it is like now to live in the kind of societies we have and consider what students need to gain from their school as persons who want to be good people.

   One way of interpreting the message of these writers is to see what they say as a call for teachers to consider the moral value of what they do. They ask us to consider the work of the school as a moral enterprise.

   There is an old adage that a good teacher could "teach the phone book". Perhaps we all once knew what that meant. Not now. Teach the phone book? To what end? Find out who owns what businesses, or ask why some people do not have phones? What knowledge shall be valued and what qualities do teachers need to have to develop the life of the classroom towards good ends? How are they to deal with the dilemmas of society and its discontents as they appear in microcosm in the classroom? These are issues addressed by a growing number of researchers who look at these dilemmas in the context of the moral life of schools.

   Philip Jackson reminds us in this book, that teachers must be sensitive to the realities of the lives students live outside of schools and not sentimentalize what happens in school in the face of what students grapple with outside. Teachers need the courage to help their students do something about their lives. David Hansen calls this process a public service - it is done for the greater good by people who act of times as critics of the system in which they work. Teachers, he says, are called to serve these higher goods which are not always explicated, and they need to be clarified through research into practice itself.

   Gunnel Colnerud and her colleagues consider how the moral possibilities of dialogue in schools can be realized in collaboration with researchers who study together with teachers the moral life of the classroom. Pertti Kanansen and his colleagues look at how teachers construe the moral dilemmas they face in classrooms because of the complexities of the society their students come from. They see those recovered experiences as the basis for dialogue and professional development. Getting at the moral ideas that underlie practice is difficult. Much is tacit. Teachers make judgments constantly but often do not analyze the basis of those judgments. What gives the authority?

   The moral dimension of teacher practice, presented here as constitutive of that work, is a fertile ground for professional reflection. Classrooms present challenges to practice everyday. Curriculum and structural reform movements do so in a more systematic way. Calls for student centred teaching and for overcoming boundaries between subjects are now common (Black and Atkin, 1996). These reforms require that teachers move away from the twin securities of subject expertise and control of classroom agendas. Critics of reform in schools frequently label teachers as resistant, but often teachers are not consulted in the reform process. More often than not reforms ignore teacher and school tradition and virtues.

   Manfred Lang and his colleagues point to the effects on the reform process of the lack of such dialogue between teachers and reformers. This failure can be seen across a number of countries with disparate school systems; it appears to be pandemic. Pam Poppleton and Theo Wubbels surveying teachers in eight countries found most concerned about reforms that affect the way they teach. They underscore the central importance to teachers of subject matter expertise. Subject matter provides a highly complex frame for the work that teachers do, as Geoffrey Roulet shows. It is difficult for teachers to shift that frame without support. Teachers who do take on new definitions of subject potential face threats from parents and others who do not accept the new frame. Geoffrey Roulet, in his case study, shows the courage that is needed to take on the redefinition of ones subject.

   Klaus-Henning Hansen discusses the strong role the subject plays in teacher socialization and how that limits teacher development, especially in relation to subject integration. He argues that more than reflective practice collective action is need to break out of the walls around subjects that grow up through socialization. Somehow the value of the goals to which integration can contribute have to be seen and felt as worthwhile by teachers. They cannot be imposed as Ewald Terhart has said. It takes courage to keep these large values in mind when under pressure from the demands of the daily routine.

   The role collective action can play in teacher development is addressed by Günter Huber and his colleagues. They suggest that the professional knowledge of teachers is the result of a dialectical process in which teachers do challenge each other - often informally. In their study teachers were asked to discuss their work with each other and the result was an opportunity to talk about problems in mastering new approaches to teaching.

   In this collaborative process, implicit standards of practice were made explicit. The important role of students in shaping practice was recognized; echoing the comments about the role of student voice in change made above by Jean Rudduck and Max van Manen. Ann Marie Hill and Richard Hopkins argue that the collaborative circle needs to be extended to the community whose involvement in schools is increasing in many jurisdictions. What role might the community play in the development of the profession? They argue that many teachers of technology studies have been asked to broaden their conception of the subject but have found it difficult to do this. One way to do this is to define the subject as a response to community needs. No longer a rather rigid sequence of shop activities, the subject becomes more open ended as it addresses community needs. Thus a new idea of the subject arises through community involvement.

   The community does speak to the school, but the school must respond in turn about the kind of world students find themselves in; a not always perfect world. Community and school are involved in a two-way process. Through this give and take teachers are being asked to make quite substantial changes in professional role and identity. How is this process of role redefinition to be sustained? Maureen Pope and her colleagues suggest that teachers have to study their own efforts at reform through a research- like process involving yet new skills and role change. But without the insights to be had from collective professional self examination, how can the change be sustained in the face of threats to professional identity? As Ewald Terhart says, the process must come from within - it cannot be legislated. He suggests that discontent about society must fuel the change process for teachers - there needs to be political fire. Here teacher education has an important role to play through the twin processes of collaboration and explication of tacit values in the development of the professional self. Karl-Oswald Bauer suggests that the professional self develops from a process that happens inside a person who interacts and communicates with other persons within the profession all of whom share many of the same external constraints and influences from outside, and also many common values. One result of this interaction is that what is often tacit becomes explicit. Ann Edwards and her colleague, as do Maureen Pope and her colleagues, argue that much of what guides practice is tacit and needs to be surfaced in teacher education. The former argue for a mentoring process which they view as a form of dialogue but with a shift from concept knowledge to a social process of self-transformation. In this way "mentoring conversations" can help student teachers uncover the basis of their actions in classrooms and a "generality of knowing" might emerge. The search for this generality is a continuing theme of these papers. Not only the generality but the frame of it. What shall that frame be? The generality has to be seen against a backdrop of change as we have characterized it here - radical and unrelenting change. It is not surprising that the term dialectical is used to describe the kind of thinking that has to go on. The grounds of practice are shifting yet always have a discernible and enduring shape - a paradox of the profession. Enduring factors are the focus of Andrea Peters' analysis of what influences teacher development. She notes the central role of the problematic situation as a locus for change. This analysis of problems by teachers and in service educators becomes the basis for development. It is both reflective and collaborative. It does not - as Philip Jackson warned - sentimentalize the problems that face teachers everyday. Yvonne de Vries and Dowe Beijaard also point to the value of teachers taking collective responsibility for improvement in the context of school culture. They caution that the collective process should not engender dependency nor reduce autonomy.

   In these papers on teacher education we see some of the answers to questions posed at the outset. The complexities of reform might easily - perhaps often do - overwhelm teachers. This often in the face of a lack of resources and unlimited demands. Some form of diagnosis is called for and in-service teacher education can be based on a diagnosis in which the goods that reforms seek are analyzed against traditions of teacher practice, and against practical realities. Assumed is some kind of common idea about what an educated person should be - some ground for a conversation. But beyond that teachers have to find out how that can be achieved in practice, and where they can locate the resources they need and develop them. Some of those resources may lie outside the school. Some of the barriers to progress may lie in demanding too much of schools. The task is daunting. The teacher is expected to enrich the provision for each child often without the resources that are needed. The challenge to the profession is to assess what those resources are and express them in such a way that the case is compelling. Ideas about reform are needed and so is a language to express them. Teachers are called to defend the ideas and the language of care which identifies their work for what it is - a public service in a political context.

To the table of contents