Terri Seddon

Faculty of Education
Monash University

Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Lahti, Finland 22-25 September 1999

This paper contributes to current debates about the future and status of the teaching profession. It suggests that professional status requires teachers and their occupational networks to pursue a structural linkage between scarce resources of knowledge and expertise and scarce resources of status and reward. The paper reviews the current status of teaching that indicates that the traditional linkage between expertise and rewards is being eroded as a result of shifts in government policy and funding priorities, and broader changes in the forms of contemporary capitalism that affirm knowledge-in-practice over academic knowledge. These and other developments challenge teachers and their embodied professionalism. The paper documents a variety of teacher responses to these challenges. It suggests that while peak organisations tend to reaffirm traditional practices of teacher professionalism, teachers themselves are embarking on innovative practices which take them beyond the conventional parameters of teacher professionalism. Six features of these innovative practices are identified as possibly representing aspects of an emergent teacher professionalism and the character of a possible future teaching profession is canvassed.

This paper is a contribution to current debates about the future of the teaching profession in Australia. Its purpose is to consider ways of enhancing the status of the teaching profession. To this end, the paper is organised in three main sections. I begin by elaborating the critical tasks and challenges confronting the teaching profession in its attempt to consolidate the status of teaching. Next I identify the way members of the teaching profession are dealing with these challenges and propose that the practical responses of teachers in a variety of educational sites provide some indication of possible futures for the profession. Finally, I draw out some tentative features of an emergent teacher professionalism that offers possible directions for advancing the work of reprofessionalising teaching.

The paper is based upon a range of my recent research conducted in the course of a large-ARC funded ethnographic study of restructuring in schools and TAFE in Victoria¹, an investigation of the reshaping of Australian education funded by the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University², and a consultancy on research in public and private vocational education and training (VET) providers commissioned by the Victorian Office of Training and Further Education³. These formal studies have been complemented by a range of more experiential and anecdotal evidence acquired in the course of my teaching, research and professional engagements.

Much of this recent work has taken me beyond the frames of school education. I have become involved in vocational education and training, in adult, community and further education and, to a lesser extent, in industry education. This experience, together with my previous experience in school education and my current involvement in higher education, means that I speak very much from a cross-sectoral perspective; one that is concerned to understand education and educational work as society-wide social processes.

Swedish researcher of professions Sarfatti Larson (1990) indicates that professionalism and professionalising phenomena establish a structural linkage between scarce resources of knowledge and expertise and scarce resources of status and reward. The work of maintaining this linkage depends upon ongoing guarantees that the state will continue to recognise and authorise those particular knowledges as a basis for reward and that the rewards will be sufficient to ensure the profession’s individual and institutional survival.

This definition of professionalism⁴ suggests that if education professionals are to pursue a self-managing professionalising project aimed at enhancing the status of teaching three main questions must be addressed:

• How do we sustain valued knowledge and expertise in the profession?
• How do we negotiate and protect the endorsement and authorisation of our specialist knowledge and expertise?
• How do we ensure rewards that are sufficient to sustain the profession both individually and institutionally?

This last question highlights the economic basis of the profession. While much of the debate about advancing the profession centres on status, income remains critical. Individuals and institutions can not survive on status alone. It therefore makes no sense to try to assert a difference between professional and industrial matters in education. As has often been said, students’ learning conditions are teachers’ working conditions. There are aspects of education industrial relations, asserted and protected by both unions and employers, that are anachronistic but they will not be resolved by seeking to distance the profession from unions. The challenge is to renegotiate the relationships between teachers’ occupational networks, rather than driving a wedge between professional associations and unions in a divisive strategy that will only undermine the teaching profession’s overall quest for a sustainable future.

In recent years, the structural linkage between scarce resources of teaching knowledge and expertise and scarce resources of status and reward has been compromised. On the one hand, the rewards for teaching have declined, in both dollar terms and in teacher's sense of a job well done. On the other hand, questions and criticisms have been raised in relation to teachers’ knowledge and expertise. This is less vitriolic than in the mid-1980s when Greg Sheridan wrote about ‘The vipers in the classroom’ but still represents a persistent undermining of the value of teachers’ knowledge.

Furthermore, there has been significant erosion of the processes which authorise teachers’ knowledge and expertise. Teacher education has been under review for years and its linkage with higher education has been criticised. The impact of vocationalism has been felt sharply in universities which are simultaneously experiencing funding cuts. The effect has been to fuel restructuring of higher education in ways that valorise knowledges that generate income not necessarily the best that has been thought and said, irrespective of its social or economic applications. This vocationalisation has problematised the hierarchy of knowledges in universities and the processes that codify academic knowledges. This reprioritising of knowledges has implications for teachers because schooling and the teaching occupation has been organised, historically, around this academic - vocational hierarchy.

On top of these practical erosions of the basis for teacher professionalism, there are a series of broader challenges which will need to be addressed if the status of teaching is to be addressed. These relate to: the historical legacies of education; the implications of globalisation and the knowledge economy; and the impact of self-management.

Historical legacies are those institutional arrangements and networks of power which, both in the past and today, shape and constrain the character of teacher professionalism. These legacies appear in both institutional and individual forms.

Institutionally, the roots of the teaching profession lie in the professional - bureaucratic partnership which provided leadership and administration of the centralised State systems of mass school education for almost the last 100 years (Seddon, 1996). The effect of this history has been to constitute the teaching profession as an occupational network based primarily on school education. Teacher organisations, unions and professional associations, and their main protagonists, the State education teaches employers, have emerged and been shaped by that close relationship between teachers and the State bureaucracies. Max Angus (1996: 120) comments, for example, on the 'timeless scripted flavour' of industrial conflicts in education have and notes that the ‘belief in central control is too ingrained in the fabric of the education system for either education department or unions to loosen the regulatory reins’ (Angus, 1996: 150

This professional - bureaucratic partnership has been further shaped by the relationship between State school education and the education of elites. This has meant that teachers have been structured by the hierarchy of academic - vocational knowledges which established the high status of academic education, in line with the mental - manual division of labour. These privileged academic norms were institutionalised through the linkages, on the one hand, with the university and its processes of codifying and authorising important knowledge in society and, on the other, with the elite private schools which provided a socially well endorsed model of what good (ie. academic) education entailed.

These institutional legacies have shaped formation of teachers as individual professionals. Teachers have been made as State professionals. They have been dependent on the State for both individual livelihood and institutional viability. They have been servants of the Crown with relatively secure employment and a relatively low wage. Their professional selves have developed as ‘heroes of social development, guardians of the citizenry of the future, pedagogic innovators, universalistic carers and as partners of and within the public’ (Lawn, 1998). Simultaneously, the substantial support they received through centralised governance, funding and industrial relations left them with relatively high levels of 'learned occupational helplessness'. They often lacked experience in managing their career, their employment relations or their economic base.

These historical legacies which make teacher professionalism resistant to change are themselves under challenge by broader social and economic changes which are having a profound impact upon the character of contemporary capitalism, the nature of work and patterns of employment, and the dominant discourses which inform commonsense views about optimal social organisation.

The context of these changes is the developments in global economic, political and social relations which are creating new forms of informational capitalism. As Manuel Castells (1998) notes, this emergent society is still capitalist with all its old inequalities but it is a society in which knowledge and information have become critical factors of production. Whereas, in industrial capitalism, the development of different energy sources contributed to major increases in productivity, in informational capitalism it is knowledge and the communication opportunities arising from information technology which makes the difference. These developments drive demand for an increasingly skilled workforce. Those who can get paid employment - not everyone - are increasingly required to be knowledgeable, computer literate and able to learn in an ongoing way. This trajectory puts education at the heart of economic development.

However, the recognition of knowledge as a generative force in production further challenges the traditional hierarchy of academic and vocational knowledges. Productivity gains rest upon knowledge in workplaces. What is valorised is not the knowledges at the core of education, institutionalised through the axis between schools and universities, but ‘knowledge-in-practice’, ‘an alive mix of information and concepts, coupled with the understanding necessary to apply them in everyday work’ (Field and Ford, 1994: 4). While the development of the ‘clever country’ depends on education, it is not the education that is currently institutionalised in schools and universities, or enacted through the teaching profession.

This valorisation of ‘knowledge-in-practice’ is affirmed over and over as public commentators speak of the challenges of globalisation, the emergence of the learning society and the necessity of lifelong learning. As the Australian Labor Party’s 1998 education policy states:

Labor recognises ... that the creation of lifelong learning relies not only on improved public resourcing, but also the modernisation of education institutions and policies. The structure and many of the priorities of our education system originated in circumstances vastly different from those of the 21st century.

The effect of these affirmations of knowledge-in-practice is to disendorse and deauthorise the traditional knowledges that have been institutionalised in school education. The scarce knowledge and expertise which the teaching profession has embodied for the last century is deemed less worthy of reward. Simultaneously, other social actors are identified as having preferred resources of knowledge and expertise. Their knowledge-in-practice is deemed more worthy of reward. It gives them status and dollars. As a result the teacher as hero of the nation is replaced by the manager as hero, leader and visionary. Private consultants are resourced as preferred knowledge producers and knowledge brokers. Private education providers are endorsed as preferred knowledge disseminators.

The contemporary trend to self-management presents a further significant challenge to a professionalising project oriented to enhancing the status of teaching. This trajectory is, of course, a major and probably longterm social development which reaches well beyond education. It is congruent with what Anthony Giddens (1994) terms the development of life style politics, the view that people seek some autonomy in their choices about the way they live their lives.

Self-management in education has gone through two quite distinct phases. The first, in the 1960s and 1970s, entailed an assertion of self-management by the teaching profession in opposition to the centralised State education authorities. Teachers, alongside parents, students and school communities, contested the authoritarian and paternalistic control of education and questioned the taken-for-granted superiority of academic knowledge. This played out in debates about democratic professionalism, school-based decision making and progressivism in relation to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Currently, there is a second phase of self-management in education. This has been given a special economic flavour in line with governments’ integration of education into economic policy. It has emphasised school-based budgeting, financial management, marketisation and procedural accountability.

In life style politics and the first wave of educational self-management the common characteristic is of individual's pursue autonomy in managing the (individual or organisational) self by asserting distinctive, culturally grounded, identities. A critical feature of contemporary (second wave) self-management in education is the way it has been pursued by governments’ by disregarding and evacuating the cultural content of individual and organisational selves. ‘Self-management’ has become a set of regulatory devices which operate by requiring teacher compliance with standardised administrative and accounting procedures. Bill Readings (1997) notes, we are being pressed away from an education grounded in national cultures and pushed towards an education of ‘excellence’. This excellence is culturally empty. It does not matter what we do, it will be excellent by definition because of compliance with accounting procedures.

‘Bottom-lines’, income generated, quality assurance procedures and government-defined accountability processes now shape what counts as ‘good education’. Such accounting undercuts the culturally diverse, lived standards of good practice that academic and vocational educators have actively asserted in the past as a basis for making judgements about, and self-regulating, their work. Reduced funding to education, work intensification for teachers and their exclusion from policy and other decision-making processes compounds this redefinition of self-management as a technology of control which tends to undermine traditional teacher professionalism and organisation.

The effect of these developments has constituted contemporary self-management in a highly contradictory way. On the one hand, self-management offers decentralisation and the promise of autonomy. On the other hand, it means the evacuation of content, the marginalisation of valued occupational cultures and the privileging of abstracted, standardised, proceduralism over judgement by teachers. Such ‘self-management’ fuels a loss of meaning in education, an uncertainty about what the priorities of the job should be. What is education for?

Recent reports in this country, such as the Senate Inquiry into the Status of Teaching (Crowley Report, 1998) and the Australian Deans of Teacher Education National Guidelines for Initial Teacher Education (ACDE, 1997), and overseas, for example, the report of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996), show that peak groups within the teaching profession are responding to the challenges of reasserting a professionalising project. These documents indicate that the networks of power - professional associations, teacher unions, teacher education academics and education researchers - that have sustained teacher professionalism for so long are still an active force.

Their prescriptions assert definitions of teacher professionalism and make a case for the continuing importance of the knowledge and expertise embodied by teachers. These interventions are important contributions to the professionalising project because they rightly indicate that there is considerable wisdom about the education of children and their necessary learning as productive and tolerant members of society. The traditional work of civilising the young and inducting them into our community and culture is still necessary. But what these reports also tend to do is reassert the traditional parameters of teacher professionalism: its school focus, its emphasis on school knowledge and skills, its concern with the young and its protection of traditional networks of power. They therefore understate the very real challenges to teacher professionalism arising from the discourse of lifelong learning, the valorisation of community-based knowledge-in-practice and their own historical legacies in the formation of teacher professionalism.

Another set of responses by the teaching profession are evident in day-to-day developments in teachers' work. Often these developments are not acknowledged or recognised at peak body levels, although in some cases, peak bodies have orchestrated support for teachers working on the ground, the National Schools Network, for example.

In my research particularly in the VET sector, I have found that teachers experience contemporary processes of decentralisation and ‘self-management’ as a process of living contradictions between economic imperatives and their own educational commitments. They are pressed towards income generation. They are subject to work intensification. They are expected to deal with a whole raft of new organisational demands - accountability processes, quality processes, various forms of management - which accompany self-management. While some teachers continue to commit themselves to the traditional parameters of teacher professionalism, many others are living the contradictions in ways which take them into new and innovative forms of educational practice. I have termed these new practices capacity-building strategies because they appear to be committed to educational values but operationalise these in ways which not only accommodate the imperatives and demands associated with self-management but also exploit opportunities in the new structures to extend educational opportunities (Seddon, 1998). Let me illustrate this point.

In a TAFE department, the remaining 3 permanent staff worked with sessional teachers coming from industry to develop a cooperative approach to curriculum development, pedagogy and assessment. The effect of this development was to meet the Institute’s managerial and budgetary requirements and also extend educational opportunities for students and staff. Perhaps more significantly, the innovations served to realign the work of the departments so that its organisational axis shifted. The department became less significant as an organisational frame and staff saw their contribution to the occupational community they served. They occupied a distinctive place in that community, producing knowledge through the engagement of industry-based and permanent teachers, disseminating knowledge as they inducted students into the knowledge and ways of the occupation, and circulating knowledge and expertise through the occupation more generally (Seddon and Brown, 1997).

In a recent consultancy investigating staff development to support research in VET providers, there was considerable evidence of staff engaged in knowledge production for organisational purposes (Seddon and Malley, 1998). CEOs in some VET enterprises approached research instrumentally as an externally imposed requirement. Other managers recognised that, in self-managing organisations, there was a need for site-based knowledge production to inform organisational decision making and, furthermore, this knowledge production provided a valuable strategy for staff development which benefited both individuals and the enterprise. Management of the enterprise increasingly became a process not of hierarchical decision-making but of cooperative engagement which supported a culture of questioning and enhanced enterprise operations.

In a small private training provider, the managing director indicates that employers seek out her training provision because it makes a difference to their productivity and profitability. She is committed to an integrated educational approach to workplace learning which is rooted in the culture of the workplace and she asserts that these educational practices depend upon the professionalism of her teachers. However, she requires her teachers to develop their skills in crossing boundaries between educational and industrial contexts, dealing with the contradictory discourses of public service education and capitalist profitability in industry, and learning to use forms of organisation and reporting which accommodate the culture of workplaces (Waterhouse and Sefton, 1997).

In schools, similar pictures emerge. In England, Lawn and MacAnGhaill’s (1996) research indicates that primary school teachers live the loss of a public system of education by refocusing their efforts on their own school workplace and its local community. Self-management has meant that they all act as managers as well as teachers. They all monitor and supervise each other within the workplace. The school as a social space has changed. The old boundaries of the public school place and the private classroom space have been reworked. Classrooms have become open to collegial surveillance while the school has become both more privatised - with security fences and increased regulation on who can enter the premises - and more outward oriented as the principal, governors and parents cross the school perimeter more frequently as they engage in building community relations, work with employers and participate in school governance.

In Australia, this is an old story too. Teachers remain circumspect about the pressures driving them towards empty self-management and they work hard to refill centrally required administrative and accounting procedures with meaningful local content (eg. Leggett, 1997). Anne Morrow’s (1995) description of schooling at Ballajura Community College in Western Australia reveals a school staff working with and alongside the local community. In the process, they changed not only the character of educational practices in the school but also the axis of learning which reaches from the school out into the community and back again. Connell, White and Johnston’s (1991) evaluation of the Disadvantaged Schools Program echoes all these trends. A little bit of discretionary funding went a long way when capacity building strategies usually directed at individual students’ learning were redirected along a school-community axis and oriented to capacity building of communities and participating teachers as well as students. Significantly, in their assessment Connell and his colleagues state that despite the criticisms of the submission based funding of the DSP,

... we consider that the submission mechanism, for all its problems, is a successful part of the Program’s original design and should be retained. (p. 270)

 

Recent changes in education have confronted teachers with new demands to work between educational and empty self-managing imperatives. While some aspects of these imperatives undermine solid educational work, its meaning and the moral authority of educators, there is considerable evidence, at a grass-roots level, to show that the changing context is driving teachers to develop distinctive innovative practices which both reassert teachers’ identities as educators and reorient their knowledge and expertise so that it is of more immediate value to self-managing communities. In these developments we can start to discern elements of a possible teacher professionalism that is, in key respects, different to that of the past.

The illustrations suggest that this emergent teacher professionalism is characterised by a number of distinctive features:

Pursuit and endorsement of self-management

Teachers are taking up opportunities for self-management. They are using the contemporary rhetoric of self-management to reassert teacher identities, define pedagogical projects with particular learners and reaffirm the cultural content of educational work. This suggests that the legacy of first wave self-management in education did become and remains quite well established, despite the more recent heavy-handed regulation of teachers and their work. As the Disadvantaged Schools Project shows, this content-full self-management, pursued since the 1970s, has provided a range of cultural resources, embodied by many of today’s teachers, which enables them to manoeuvre around regulatory requirements in inventive ways which enhance opportunities for learning and teaching. These resources have been enhanced as teachers work has been reshaped by policy changes and marketisation. The Dawkins reforms enabled significant professional learning through, for example, the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning. Market pressure to extend the student numbers has encouraged important curricular, pedagogical and assessment reforms which have made learning more accessible and enjoyable for students. The work of the National Schools Network has been another important development which has supported and enabled the consolidation of professional self-management. Significantly too, this initiative was profession-driven. Teachers turned the resources of teacher networks associated with the teacher unions to this task.

The decentralisation of education through processes of administrative self-management has created conditions which have, in certain respects, opened up possibilities for professional self-management. Educational markets remove some previous restrictions on what teachers can do, while also reimposing other restrictions such as accounting requirements, competition for student enrolments and increased employment uncertainty. The opportunity for educational organisations to generate discretionary funding also opens up possibilities for teachers' self-determination. There are costs and dangers in this process but, as the DSP showed, a little bit of discretionary funding can enable teachers to pursue educational options that were, otherwise, unthinkable.

There are, without doubt, a number of downsides in these reforms, most importantly the impact on access and equity for students and teachers, but these costs of reform become sites for debate, dissent and further innovation. Teachers are increasingly aware that the benefits of discretionary funding, from whatever source, are entirely eroded if there is insufficient base-level funding to cover the regular running costs of education. Schools that have raised funds through their own efforts are outraged when those precious dollars have to be used in routine ways rather than supporting innovation and development. More than before, teachers and the wider community, are questioning the role of government in education, asking why government responsibility to provide an education for the Australian people is not being realised because of governments’ unwillingness to fully fund the routine costs of education.

The common feature in practices of this emergent teacher professionalism lies in teachers affirmation of educational commitments. They deal with the new imperatives of self-management but without jettisoning their sense of good educational practice as a pedagogical service oriented to students. Our TAFE research shows that, in a context of marketisation, some staff do take on a highly commercialised approach to selling educational goods and services but most attempt to ‘do business with an educator’s heart’⁵.

Bob Connell (1995) argues that this value commitment is the defining feature of educational work. He says, education is a distinctive form of work because it is oriented to the ‘development of capacities for social practice’. It is based not upon the work of teachers crafting students but upon a joint labour process, a process of co-production which is realised through the work of learner and teacher (Fielding, 1998). The outcomes of this co-production is the development of capacities for social practice both for the individuals involved and also for the collectives (nation, community, occupation, tribe) to which they belong. These capacities become evident as individual development: as learners gain in knowledge, skills and attitudes; and as they increase their capacities to act as members of communities. More significantly, this process of learning enables individuals to learn to learn in an ongoing and expansive cycle of activity, reflection, insight and understanding (JVET). Education enhances students and teachers capacities to act not just once off but in an ongoing way. And, as a result, this work of educating enhances not only individual development but also the collective capacity to act, a capacity which is, itself, a significant form of collective property for the society, nation, tribe, community or occupation.

The remaking of educational spaces and relationships

The work of capacity building goes on in many sites. What makes current developments distinctive is the way educational spaces are being reconfigured to facilitate capacity building. Traditional educational spaces - like schools, TAFE and universities - are being reoriented along axes which establish practical connections between teachers and external communities, even where teachers remain on site. This reconfiguring of education spaces entails a reworking of relationships, bringing communities and networks which previously inhabited relatively distinct social spaces into articulation with one another. The effect is to destabilise those pre-existing communities but also to create dissonances, enhance the stock of cultural resources and generate learning and innovation. Hybridisation of individuals and communities is one outcome. The reassertion of distinctive identities is another.

These reconfigured educational spaces and relations create new learning communities. As teachers move beyond the boundaries of traditional educational organisation, their educational knowledge and expertise encounters community-based knowledge-in-practice, creating considerable scope for professional as well as community capacity building. These learning communities are not just local communities. They are shot through by globalising forces - TV, internet, worldwide goods and services, just the popular culture of contemporary living. They might be called glocal learning communities because of the way they are influenced and shaped by global developments.

The emergence of diverse glocal learning communities is often a self-managing response to changing circumstances. Their effect is to increase demands on government in education. There is pressure for funding arrangements that support such self-managing community-building because of communities differential capacity to sustain learning which, ultimately, benefits all Australians. The proliferation of self-managing community learning also underline the importance of learning oriented to nation-building. The nation is, of course, a glocal community. But unlike communities based on region, occupation or choice of life style, membership of the national community is obligatory. We are born into our membership of the national glocal community or actively commit to it through formal citizenship procedures. This membership gives us birth rights, such as access, participation and justice, but also obligations to contribute to the collective capacity to act and property of the national community. These national collective obligations, rights and responsibilities call for sustained citizenship education, alongside and in dialogue with community capacity-building.

Lifelong learning for teachers

Participation in glocal communities provides opportunities for lifelong learning for teachers. Stepping outside the educational domain is challenging. It requires teachers to learn new skills and capacities to act across community boundaries. Not least, it requires that they overcome their learned occupational helplessness in terms of career management, negotiation of individual and institutional income base, and contractual arrangements in relation to the job and working conditions. It provides new opportunities for integrating work and learning and new scope for self-managing a balance between learning, work and life which is grounded in actual communities and relationships.

This kind of learning is challenging, confronting, time consuming and often hard. It is important to acknowledge the very difficult work of learning outside our traditional comfort zones. Acknowledgment is the first step in properly recognising the resources necessary for lifelong learning, particularly time, social support, and opportunities. These resource questions raise further issues for a self-managing professional project oriented to enhancing the status of teaching: who can access professional lifelong learning? What should it include? Who pays?

The reconfiguring of educational spaces and relationships, and the engagement of teachers with different glocal communities, provide opportunities for revalorising teachers knowledge and expertise as worthy of reward. This revaluing is not just in terms of their academic knowledge which may or may not be seen as a useful resource but in terms of their knowledge-in-practice relating to capacity building. Teachers know how to facilitate students learning and, more importantly, their learning to learn. Teachers are also powerfully multi-skilled, as is indicated when teachers on Teacher Release to Industry projects do not return to classrooms. Teachers’ array of skills is a well kept occupational secret but its lack publicity is part of the problem for a professionalising project aimed at raising the status of the profession. It is also a problem for individual teachers who feel acutely the lack of public recognition of what they do so well .

Teachers have long been knowledge workers in communities. Teachers can not only teach, they are sophisticated producers, recorders, organisers, appliers, disseminators and brokers of knowledge. In industry, there are growing numbers of enterprise-based teachers. They are often taken on by companies to provide staff training in the workplace but, quite commonly, these enterprise-based teachers develop a brief which takes them beyond the role of trainer. The train and also assist in organisational development. Their discursive skills, multiliteracies and information management skills mean that they can cross boundaries, talking with CEOs and shopfloor workers, facilitating the work of management and change and also providing support and advocacy for workers lower down in the hierarchy (eg. Down, 1997).

Linking expertise and rewards in glocal communities

Teachers working in industry are already being recognised for the contribution they can make to organisational development and change. While some enterprise-based teachers are poorly paid, there are also better rewarded employment opportunities. Positions are being advertised at quite high salaries ($70,000) for educators with a minimum of 5years experience who can develop, coordinate, and deliver training in industry. The significance of this point is twofold. Firstly, it indicates that teachers’ knowledge and expertise in relation to the work of capacity building and the role of knowledge worker in industry is being publicly recognised and rewarded. Secondly, the availability of such employment opportunities and salary levels have implications for teacher supply.

This public recognition and reward is also occurring in other sectors. The City of Birmingham, in England, for instance, has defined itself as ‘The Learning City’. It is developing a sophisticated strategy for urban development which builds centrally on the capacity building role of learning through life. Birmingham recently hosted a City Summit to discuss the question of urban development in a globalising world. Political leaders from 12 cities around the world met at the same time as the Birmingham Summit of G8 nations.

The aim of the city summit was to exchange ideas and experiences about urban development and the contribution of the city as a distinctive form of organisation. Tim Brighouse and his colleagues acknowledge that education is fundamental to the survival of cities as civilised societies for all citizens. This approach refuses an individualising and abstracted neo-liberal strategy of ‘city boosterism’, investing in events, spectaculars, casinos and high tech industries to attract globalised, high roller-high investor, capital flows. Instead it acknowledges that the strengths of a community lies in having a place and encouraging development in all its peoples:

The fundamental challenge for urban governments at the start of the 21st century arises from the relationship between the city as a place of habitation and the city as a local centre in a globalising economy. It is a relationship which requires the priority of social cohesion to be set alongside the priority of economic growth. It highlights the tension between the human need for identity and stability in everyday life and the dynamics of rapid change and discontinuity characteristic of the developing global systems of production and exchange (Birmingham Assist, 1998)

The Learning City constitutes another kind of reconfigured educational space in which new relationships, new opportunities for learning and new networks of power are developing and in which teachers' knowledge and expertise are being rewarded and resourced.

These six features evident in some contemporary educational work flag, perhaps, an emergent form of teacher professionalism. If such self-managing teacher professionalism could be sustained, developing in productive association with both other self-managing community initiatives and government, we might ultimately see a teaching profession that is not just school-based, tied to academic knowledge and expertise, and oriented to the population management requirements of government. Instead, we might see a profession that encompasses:

• specialist teachers working in dedicated sites of foundational education and training (eg. schools, TAFE, universities);
• generalist teachers for the learning society applying knowledge-in-practice related to learning to learn and capacities related to knowledge work across glocal communities; and
• knowledge workers for the informational economy, enhancing productivity and pursuing sustainable development that is sensitive to human need by linking learning, work and organisational development in workplaces and other community settings.

If these different groups were to coalesce as a modernised teaching profession, they would cohere because shared value commitments had been negotiated between the different types of teachers. Such negotiation will challenge all parties to rework their particular practices of education to purse capacity building both amongst individuals and for wider communities, and also to acknowledge the contextual constraints on capacity building. The outcome may be a commitment to educational work oriented to sustainable individual and community development, work that not only recognises the significance of potential but also acknowledges the significance of contextual and resource limits. It promises a professionalising project that seeks to enhance the status of teachers and to pursue rewards sufficient to sustain the profession both individually and institutionally.

Sustaining this kind of self-managing teacher professionalism will not be easy. Governments have recently shown themselves to be unsupportive of teachers and to pursue strategies that sidestep their public responsibilities for public education. But their support, endorsement and rewards might be rewon if teachers’ knowledge and expertise were reconfigured to better fit economic and political imperatives. Importantly, this would not mean dispensing with traditional school knowledge or the values associated with preparing young people for productive and tolerant citizenship. Rather, it would mean consolidating such general education alongside an enriching engagement with knowledge-in-practice in content-full learning through life. This is much more than vocationalism, it is an education for socially responsible self-management.

1. This project was the Social Organisation of Educational Practice (SOEP) project (eg. Seddon, Angus, and Rushbrook, 1994; . Seddon, Angus, Rushbrook and Brown, 1998). We acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council in funding this research.

2. This project was the ‘Reshaping Australian Education’ Project, one of the strands in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences Reshaping Australian Institutions project (Seddon, Angus and Selleck, 1998)

3. See Seddon and Malley (1998).

4. For a more detailed discussion see Seddon (1997)

5. This was a phrased used by an associate director in a Melbourne Institute of TAFE.

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This document was added to the Education-line database on 14 February 2000