Introduction to PART 5 :
DEVELOPING THE PROFESSIONAL SELF
While we know that professional development is an autonomous personal process, it is very much dependent on outside support, and subject to system constraints. In this part of the book we look how these external factors interact with the process of professional development.
Karl-Oswald Bauer sees the professional self developing as the individual builds up a core of aims and values needed to deal with external demands as they bear on personal wishes and impulses: an action and knowledge repertoire to deal with educational tasks and to communicate with other members of the same profession. Are these competencies sufficient to understand what characterises the professional self? Bauer says no. He argues that the individual has to be considered in construing the professional self. This professional self is seen as the outcome of a self-organising process in which personal impulses and a desired picture of a self are balanced. The context in which this self develops is related to the structure of the educational system, which gives teachers more or less "professional" freedom and authority.
Like Karl-Oswald Bauer, Yvonne de Vries and Dowe Beijaard locate at the core of professionalism the teacher beliefs that guide their action and knowledge. These beliefs, they note, affect the kind of knowledge that teachers assimilate, and integrate into their conceptual framework. In a study of eight experienced secondary school teachers de Vries and Beijaard explore core beliefs about student learning. Their central question was not only to what extent teachers develop or change their beliefs about student learning, but also to determine factors which influence this development. They found that teachers improved their knowledge by reflecting together on their beliefs about how students learn. While mainly an individual process, they assume that developing more sophisticated beliefs is possible through collaborative efforts. Jean Rudduck, as we saw above, also points to the place in teacher professional development of understanding students - both in terms of how they learn and also in terms of the values students bring to classroom life.
Andrea Peter notes the central role that the problematic situation plays as a locus for reflection and change. Professional development occurs as teachers and in- service educators collectively analyse problems - it is both reflective and collaborative and not sentimental. Peter describes three stages of change: exploration as the teacher experiences the introduced strategies; change in more general beliefs about teaching and learning as experience develops; and in the third stage these beliefs become more flexible as they are explored in relation to the person’s professional self.
Anne Edwards and Lynn Odgen have researched this change process by looking at how student teachers develop their identities as informed practitioners and at the role of the mentor in this process. They note that the context of teacher identity formation involves having to teach many subjects which comprise the primary school curriculum in England and Wales. This subject demand places considerable pressure on mentors and teachers as they converse about these practices where identities are formed. They argue for mentoring as a form of dialogue but with a shift from content knowledge to a collective process of self-transformation.
As the authors of this part of the book stress, curriculum improvement and professional development are not the result of an isolated individual effort, but are mediated by dialogue in which occurs: collegial exchange, collaborative work and participation in a community of practice in order to develop a common language. In this sense the professional self is a collective self, not a charismatic individual self.