The large scale structures of gender and class, race and generation, the organisation of the state and civil society, and the international relations between states and economies, form a complex field of social forces bearing on education and its diverse workplaces. Within this field, and very much under its influence, the face-to-face participants (teachers, administrators, students, sometimes parents and employers) negotiate an internal political order or ‘regime’. This regime – the pattern of power, consent, alliance and resistance, that is temporarily established as the basis for daily functioning – is central to the educational history of each education workplace. Likewise the regimes that predominate in a school system or sector are central to its history as a system. There is therefore a social basis for the notorious conservatism of school systems. On the one hand, this conservatism entrenches the influence of groups who have most reason to resist change, notably middle class, middle aged, bureaucratically trained men. On the other, it protects educational principles and traditions in the face of faddish change agendas. The exercise of power by neo-liberal governments over the last 30 years has operated as much through the redefinition and disruption of established education boundaries and cultural understandings (e.g. school and diverse learning spaces, general and vocational education, teacher-trainer-instructor) mediated by funding, curriculum, governance and accountability arrangements, as through direct interventions into the operations of education workplaces and the formation of teachers.
Power generates resistance. Teachers, like other workers, are active in confronting, evading or blunting control over their work. Where the overall policy of unions is strong, workplace unionism is a major form of defences. Teacher unionism, plus the state’s historic push to indirect control, has sometimes opened a space for industrial democracy. Where this is official policy, however symbolic, it can provide a venue for teachers to negotiate issues of control. In some schools principals seek some kind of endorsement for their policies from staff. Where unions are weak, such as in the United States and increasingly in other Anglo-Saxon countries pursuing market reform, resistance is more likely to be informal or individual. Yet even with teacherproof curriculum, competency frameworks, intensified workplaces, individualised performance management, teachers find ways of asserting some control over their work. There is evidence of teachers blunting the impact of curriculum packages, developing sophisticated strategies for playing a ‘smoke and mirrors’ game with performance targets and indicators, and, ultimately, drawing a line in the sand in relation to time spent doing work.
The Culture and Politics of Teachers’ Work
The social patterning of teachers and their work has effects that are felt both in and beyond the classroom, school, or system. Teachers contribute to an economics of schooling and to the production of meaning and significance in educational workplaces. They make and remake a culture and organisation of work and so fuel political dynamics which cut across personal and institutional life and play a part in the broader social and historical movements of class and gender formation (Lawn & Grace, 1987).
Life history research has revealed how teachers experience and adjust to contradictions in their experience; for example, how the experience of being a teacher of working class origins in an English grammar school (Worpole, 1985), a Maori girl becoming a teacher in post-1945 New Zealand (Middleton, 1987), or a Puerto Rican woman becoming a university professor (Franquiz, 2005) shapes practice and, in some cases, politicises it. Living these contradictions can turn a complex lived experience into a conscious understanding of the way one’s space for action is shaped by social limits and possibilities that are made and can be remade through political action (e.g. Goodson & Numan, 2002).
Resistance, conflict, debate and struggle are central to political action, as are the construction of narratives that open up alternatives, the negotiation of policies and principles the provide a framework for action, and organisational work that enables groups of people to coalesce around distinctive ways of seeing and acting in the world. Pressures to redefine teachers’ working conditions and employment relations are experienced differently by different teachers. The young and old, those in compulsory education or adult education workplaces, can see new reforming discourses in quite different light, offering different patterns of constraint and opportunity. Teachers participate in the politics of reform as ‘Old Turks’ or ‘Diehards’, or by conservatively relinquishing public space through burnout, by withdrawing behind the classroom door, or by retiring early (Riseborough & Poppleton, 1991). Deskilling and proletarianisation are evident but as heterogenous trends shaped by the division of labour. They affect men and women of different ages in different ways. This is not a unidirectional ‘degradation of work’ but a complex redefinition of skill, rewards and identity formation. These local, personal and institutional politics contribute to broader discursive politics through which different groups struggle to win hearts and minds, and co-opt support for their experiences and commitments (e.g. Ball, 1990).
In all these cultural and political processes, the shaping and making of teachers’ work can become part of broader social and historical movements with long term consequences. In South Africa a coloured woman’s commitment to educating her students bring her into conflict with the apartheid regime. It leads to conscious political involvement in the struggle against apartheid and changing relationships with her family, friends, students and other teachers (Russell, 1989). Economic crisis in the Philippines has been accommodated through personal austerity by Filipino teachers but with consequences for their longer-term family life and their involvement in teacher organisations (del Fierro & Dalman, 1987).
In these cases, individuals’ solutions to complex and contradictory circumstances have coalesced by sheer weight of numbers into a social force for remaking the social and educational order. But the way these mobilisations play out depend upon their social and historical circumstances. Mobilisation in the post-1945 period in, for example, Africa contributed to nationalist independence movements, which after independence were tamed by channelling teachers energies into personal security and career advancement (Dove, 1979). In the 1970s and 1980s mobilisation in new social movements fuelled backlash politics that coalesced in economic reforms and neo-liberal politics. What the trajectory beyond neo-liberalism will be remains to be seen.
Teachers, Power and Authority
This chapter has highlighted the significance and inter-related manifestations of power and authority in teachers’ work and the need for an analytical framework that considers these aspects of teaching explicitly. It has outlined an approach to understanding power and authority by focusing on teachers as workers. Anchoring analysis in this way recognises the complex power relations that are centred on the employment relation. It provides a way of thinking about teachers as an occupational group that has features in common with other occupations but also distinctive features as a consequence of the job they do – educating the young, and increasingly older adults, by enabling learning. Approaching teachers in this way reveals the social relations of power which mobilise ongoing relational processes to form and shape teachers’ work. The outcomes generated through these social processes are not just teachers and teaching techniques but a diverse network of entities and identities associated with educational work within particular historical and spatial locations.
This relational approach to teachers’ work goes beyond a mechanical understanding of structure and agency and, instead, emphasises the social construction of teachers and their work through practices which constitute, shape and constrain the formation of teachers as entities-identities within relations of power. In this respect, the idea of ‘structure and agency’ does not presume that abstract individuals disconnected from their social settings are active agents and that those social settings made up of institutions and other structures are somehow inert, as if agentic people flowed within structural pipes.
Rather, the relational approach sees both individuals and institutions as particular forms of society (realised at different scales – body, local, national, global) which are constituted as entitites-identities through everyday practical activity. Structureagency is therefore not a duality but the dynamic imbrication of entitites-identities with animating forces, which have been described as the ‘inner strife and intrinsic contradictions’ within social life that revolutionise practice (Marx, 1976/1845). It leads to ‘persons speaking out of inner need’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 148) in ways which articulate personal troubles, and it identifies social issues and mobilises practical action to address matters of shared concern (Mills, 1971). These relational processes are mediated by language, through the stories that individuals tell themselves and each other, as well as through institutional myths, policy advocacy and the rules and lived norms that define political regimes. So ‘while agents engage with structures through reflexive interaction, structures themselves are often scripts of great social and cultural power which carry rules, resources and meanings for agents, thereby contextualising and legitimising their actions’ (Axford, 2002).
From this relational perspective, teachers’ work can be seen as a form of political action, in two respects. Firstly, teachers exercise power as an authority to teach which is legitimated as a consequence of their social position and occupational identity. This authorisation is contingent upon particular workplace regimes of power and control, and also broader patterns of institutionalisation – the way the state, the law, the world of work, the demands of civil society are constructed in specific historical and spatial contexts as a particular political regime with agreed frameworks which distinguish, regulate and resource social institutions and their practices. The definition of the teachers’ job, its scale and character, its orchestration through governing processes, like curriculum, accountability measures and the preparation of teachers as workers, are all constituted within the large scale field of social forces that shapes societies and eras within relations of power. Yet the authorised work of the teacher within a particular regime of power does not absolve teachers from their wider roles as citizens with the right and responsibility to participate in the responsible use of power.
Secondly then, and regardless of the particular demands or constraints of their job, teachers exercise power as an authority to participate, and enable others to participate, in democratic politics. This responsibility to participate in responsible decisionmaking is legitimated as a consequence of their status as citizens in a democracy. In democratic citizenship, the power to act is critical to the formation of collective agencies that can act legitimately on behalf of the people and for the public good. The legitimacy of states, and the democratic politics which sustain them, are undercut when people’s opinions about what should be done by or within the collective agency are marginalised or excluded (Davidson, 1997). In this regard, teachers are political actors because they contribute to industrial democracy and to democratic politics in ways that are not necessarily consistent with the specification of their job that is legitimised through their employment contract (Seddon & Mellor, 2006).
The complex relationship between teachers’ work and political action, authorised respectively through their occupational and citizen status, is not fixed and immutable, but is constituted within long term social relationships. Research shows that the licensed autonomy which constructed teachers as professionals for much of the twentieth century has been rolled back alongside the wider redistribution of power from public to private sector, from the domain of people rights to the domain of property rights, in the early twenty-first century, The examples which opened this chapter illustrate these contradictory views and political struggles. In this long-term trajectory, teachers’ traditional work, and their authority to enable learning through intense individual engagement, has been troubled as the framework of publicly accepted norms which framed and legitimated their occupational practices and their practices as democratic citizens have shifted. In these times, teachers’ work research has focused in on teachers ‘speaking out of inner need’ to problematise and mobilise around key tipping points in education. Proliferating research on globalisation and the re-scaling of education (e.g. as lifelong learning) and education governance, on the social organisation of knowledge via curriculum, professionalism, and research, and on teachers identity and self-work, are important fronts in this ongoing history of teachers’ work and the active sites where teachers as workers and political actors are engaging in everyday practical politics.
Biographical Notes
Terri Seddon is Professor of Education at Monash University and Director of the Centre for Work and Learning Studies. Her research focuses on change and continuity in education (lifelong learning) and work. She has a special interest in teachers and their work and in the way teachers are being reorganized in contemporary contexts in which emerging knowledge-based economies confront challenges of social cohesion and citizenship. Her research has addressed teachers’ work in school settings but increasingly focuses on adult educators work in vocational and higher education and in diversified and de-centred learning spaces formed in workplaces, communities and networks. Terri is currently a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts involved in national competitive research assessments through the Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences panel.
Phoebe Palmieri has worked in vocational education for more than 20 years, as an instructional designer, a manager, and for the last 10 years as an independent consultant and researcher. She has undertaken many professional development projects for teaching and other vocational education and training staff, and maintains her teaching currency by sessional teaching and by mentoring practitioner researchers. Her research interests, beginning in the area of flexible learning, now extend to areas more broadly related to teaching and learning. She is at present engaged on EdD research at Monash University, looking into aspects of the professional identity of TAFE teachers as described by teachers and students and in various literature streams.