Annual Conference 2007Daventry

Servants of a Passionate Profession?

• Pleasantries

• Presumptions

• Platitudes

• Prejudices

• Polemic

Vague Meanderings

• Teaching as an expression of self

• The world today and tomorrow• The role of the profession in

this new era• How GTCs can best serve the

profession.

Freid R L 1995 “The Passionate Teacher: A Practical Guide” Beacon Boston Mass.

“Passionate people are the ones who make a difference to our lives. Sometimes that passion burns with a quiet refined intensity; sometimes it bellows forth with thunder and eloquence.”

“ We Teach Who We Are” Parker J Palmer

The Courage to Teach

Jossey-Bass 1998

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.

Amiel,Henri-Frederic

Sacred Fire

“ Holding ideals is not exhibiting warm and fuzzy feelings but needs to be valued as part of the intensive educational debate about fundamental purposes….the absence of which undermines the heart of professionalism.”

» Sockett H.

» The Moral Base for Teacher Professionalism>

Teaching:A Complex Interaction

“… a public recognition that effective learning involves, essentially an ‘interactive chemistry’ between learner and teacher, which depends on process as much as content and is an expression of personal values and perceptions as much as competences and knowledge.”

Day, C. “Teachers in the twenty-first century: time to renew the vision.” Teachers and Training: Theory and Practice,

6, 1, pp 101-115. 2000.

Passion

Convictions

Emotions

Values

Idealism: Moral Purpose : Mission : Vocation: Stance

Teaching the Vocation of Vocations

• Shapers of the Future

• Custodians of Culture

• Makers of Meaning

• Vestigages of Immortality• 40th anniversary dinner

Educational leaders as caring teachersNoddings School Leadership and Management Vol 26 No 4

Education worthy of its name will help students to develop as :•Persons•Thoughtful citizens•Competent parents•Faithful friends•Capable workers•Generous neighbours•Lifelong learners

It avoids coercion and prefers the language of:•Invitation•Offering•Encouragement•Guidance•Sharing•Advice

Rather than compulsion, prescription, testing and assignment.

Children Need

• Ears that hear the whispers of life• Eyes that see both things & possibilities• Mind that understands uncertainty• Heart that knows the joy of success & the fun

of failure

• An abiding sense of curiosity and wonder

Teaching an Exercise in Vulnerability

Teaching is all about mastery but is never far from mystery

Teaching transcends the acquisition of skills and is rooted in values and emotional connectedness

D. J. Reitz: 1998 Moral Crisis in the Schools; What Parents and Teachers Need to Know Baltimore Cathedral Foundation Press

The impersonal teacher is saying in effect: ‘‘I am here because I am paid; you are here because you have to be. We will both be satisfied if you get passing grades. I can’t be concerned about how you develop as a person or what you do in life with the information I am communicating. I teach you what I am told to teach and that is the limit of my responsibility for you.”

Our Work in Context

Past Experiences: Present Realities

• Political interference

• ‘Marketisation’ of education

• Prescription• Central control –

– Delegated responsibility– Kentucky Fried

Curriculum

• New Right • Globalisation• Connectivity• Diversity• Pax Americana• GTcs

– Servants or Agents of Control?

• Codes?• Standards?• Disciplinary

Function?

Fielding, M. (Ed) 2001 Taking Education Really Seriously: Four Years Hard Labour, New York: Routledge/Falmer Press

England’s reforms have no place for

values or how people should live their lives and care for others:

“no place for either the language or experience of joy, of spontaneity, of life lived in ways that are vibrant and fulfilling rather than watchfully earnest, focussed and productive of economic activity.”

Discourse of Derison

• Education isn’t Wurking• Free- Market Stalinism• Era of Distrust- Professionals viewed as self

interested groups• Specificity and density as means of control• Kentucky Fried Curriculum V’s The Julie

Andrews Model

Present Realities: Cultural Revolution

Health Warning

Tesseract

Thatcher ‘79

Reagan ‘81

NEW RIGHT AGENDA

New Right – culture ?

“The most obvious hallmark of the Thatcher and Major governments has been a ferocious onslaught on institutional autonomy, diversity and stability in the name of the rationality of the market place. Almost all of the institutions which used to shield an unusually stable and diverse civil society from the arrogance of the politicians in temporary command of the state, or which embodied values and practices at variance with those of market economies have felt the lash of this Tory Jacobinism.”

Marquand, D 1994- Guardian, 16th of July

Erosion of Social Capital

“No such thing as society” : Liberal individualist Agenda

Individualism vs Communitarian

Competition vs Cooperation

Performance vs Service

“What we risk losing, many agree, are those communal spaces where meaningful social interaction broadens people’s sense of self beyond the “me” and “I” into the “we” and “us”.”

(Crossman et al 2000)

The Economic Revolution

Knowledge Society :

Global / Knowledge Economy

Consumerist Society

New Right Consensus

Chindia Syndrome

India / Russia

China / Brazil

Post Industrial Age : New Economic World Order

China-------------India

• 3rd largest economy• Will be largest user

of oil by 2009• Largest exporter of

info technology goods

• 50% of world’s cement

• Graduates exceeds UK population

• Oil demands will increase 300% in 10 years

• India now major source of services such as Tax Management

OutSourcing

• Outsourcing work to “developing countries” brings75% reduction in wages and 100% rise in productivity

• Tradable Services -outsourcing no longer confined to unskilled jobs-( accountants, computer programmers etc. more readily outsourced than taxi drivers etc. –Alan Blinder Princeton Univ.)

• SEAGATE move to Indonesia

Globalisation- the Impact

• Globalisation –Homogenisation ??– “Sameness” coupled with fluidity– Cash rich time poor– Work as source of income not pride– Decline in Social Capital—Common Good?

• Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone

• Those who don’t share in the economic benefits turn inwards:

• Culture / Ethnicity / Religion • Escapist disengagement

Parisian RiotsWorking Class Loyalist DisenchantmentHedonist LifestyleSuicide –major problem in N. Ireland

Alain Michel-- Inspector General of France’s of Education system2001 OECD publication on future of education

“Globalisation, because of the risks it brings of soulless standardization, can lead to fragmentation and a reduced sense of belonging to a wider community. The excesses of unbridled markets, in which prices and the market are more important than social or cultural relationships, are being met with a reaction of narrow nationalism, regionalism and parochialism.”

Globalisation : Delors Report

“People today have a dizzying feeling of

being torn between a globalisation whose manifestations they can see and sometimes have to endure, and their search for roots, reference points and a sense of belonging.”

“Learning the Treasure Within” Delors et Al 1996 Unesco Report: Paris

Sennett, R.(1999) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. London WW Norton

The conditions of the new economy feed…on experience that drifts in time , from place to place, from job to job….. Short term capitalism threatens to corrode (the) character which binds human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self.

How can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments.

SYSTEM LIFE - WORLD

GOVERNMENT

BUREAUCRACY

ECONOMY

VALUES

BELIEFS

DREAMS

MYTHS

HABERMAS 1984

“SYSTEM IS COLONISING THE LIFE WORLD”

Breaking News

“ It’s more of the same.” says Carnegie Trust.

• Falling Cost of Technologies

• Increasing Migration

• Aging Population

• Increasing Role of Devolved Government

Contexts

• Socio-economicinequalities

•Corporate power

•Pressure on global resources

• Rising individualism

• Cultural & religious diversity

• Fluid work patterns

• Shifting identities

•Disengagement from formal politics

•Single issue politics

•Pervasive technology

•Rise of digital natives

•Visibility of security state

•Regulation of civic life

•Increasing importance of rights agenda

Uncertainties

Limits of Economics

Shifting Activism

Personal Values

State and Individual

NEW TIMES: BEST OF TIMES?

• Disconnected Times

• Progression Dislocated

• Logic confounded

• Simple stories no longer suffice

Passivity = Complicity

“A dominant force may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalising and universalising such beliefs to render them self evident and apparently inevitable, denigrating ideas which might challenge it, excluding rival forms of thought.”

(Eagleton 1991)

Call to Arms

Teacher Activism:Mobilising the Profession

Plenary Address bera Conference 2003

Judith Sachs bera 2003

“….the possibility of an activist teaching profession is not the imaginings of an armchair activist or a utopian idealist but rather it is socially responsible strategy for improving education provision across the board. Hope is not enough –mobilizing the teaching profession, the media and various community groups in the interests of intelligent education policy is the priority!”

Idealism as Antidote

• Passion – Nurtures Conviction– Facilitates Freire’s “Loving Pedagogy”– Creates Fullan’s “Moral Purpose”– Sustains us on that wet Friday afternoon.

Ideals prosper in Community

Ideals whither in Isolation

Social Capital

Moral Visionary Profession “…making teaching into a moral, visionary profession once more

where teachers know and care about their world as well as and as part of their work.

It means teachers recapturing their status and dignity as some of society’s leading intellectuals, and not being the mere technicians, instruments and deliverers of other people’s agendas………..

Those who focus only on teaching techniques and curriculum standards and who do not also engage teachers in the greater social and moral questions of their time, promote a diminished view of teaching and teacher professionalism that has no place in a sophisticated knowledge society.”

Hargreaves A. Teaching in the Knowledge Society2003

GTCNI Response

• Promote a Sense of Moral Purpose

• Competences transcending utilitarian

• Promote Communities of Practice

• Encourage Wider Debate

Re-intellectualise the Profession

Moral Purpose• Code of values

– developed in partnership with the profession– expressed as commitments– not as a series of commandments

• Charter for Education– agreed by all stakeholders– Identifying the core purposes of

education:• eschews the merely utilitarian• places holistic development at the centre of

our endeavours

Code of Values & Professional Practice

• Celebrates the unique relationship between teachers and those entrusted to their care

• Commitments –beneficent approach– Learners– Colleagues & others engaged education – the Profession

• Makes Explicit Values long Implicit

• Included in our Competences

Statement of Purpose: CHARTER

UNESCO

• Learning- to KNOW

• Learning- to DO

• Learning- to LIVE TOGETHER

• Learning- to BE

Competences & Professional Knowledge

Professional Knowledge Sharpe

R, 2004 How do professionals Learn and Develop? Implications for Staff and Education Developers.

“ Professional knowledge is no longer viewed as just consisting of a standardised, explicit and fixed knowledge base. It is now seen as knowledge which exists in use, is ethical in its use and is changed by experience. The distinctive nature of professional knowledge lies in the interplay between its construction and use. When teachers use their knowledge, use changes what that knowledge is.”

Meaningful Competences

• Competences not Standards

• Teacher as a Moral Agent

• Reflective

• Contextually Situated

• Professional Knowledge seen as Organic

• Cognitive underpinning / knowledge values

Competence: developmental continuum

• Life-long— hence Code Commitment• Competences- never fully mastered!

– the nature and level of the teacher’s experience and their personal effectiveness;

– the work-based context; and

– the roles teachers have experienced and the development opportunities arising from such experiences.

Hayes,D. Opportunities and Obstacles in the Competencey-Based Training of Primary Teachers in England. Harvard Educational

Review Vol 69 Number 1 1999

If competence statements are used as a basis for informed discussion and reflection upon classroom practice between tutors, students, and classroom teachers, they will fulfill an important function. If they are used mechanically within an inflexible assessment regime framework, it is likely that the preparation of teachers…. will become miserably rigid, unsympathetic towards the realities and rigors of classroom life, and at worst, an impediment to creative and innovative teaching.

GTCNI VISION

Our Collective Responsibility

To be….“active agents in the production of a new

pedagogic discourse, rather than merely the

consumers of the professional knowledge produced by

academics and educational researchers.”

(Edwards & Brunton)

Cautionary Note

Price of Failure

• “ …do their job, nothing more nothing less, aided in this by codified rules, timetables and lesson plans. The restrictiveness of their (assigned) texts and regulations serves them to adhere to their minimalist assiduity….the sacred fire which once lit their work gradually dies to a smoulder.”

» Hamon & Rotman

PS

The “Hargreaves Agenda

• Andy

Don’t be “Too busy rescuing drowning people to look to see what’s causing them to fall in.”

• David

Remember “ A society of sheep breeds a government of wolves”