Connell, R. (2009) Good teachers on dangerous ground

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Connell, R. (2009). Good teachers on dangerous ground: towards a new view of teacher quality and professionalism. Critical Studies in Education, 50(3), 213-229, https://doi.org/10.1080/17508480902998421

1. models of the good teacher in Australia from the colonial-era good servant, through an ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, to contemporary lists of teacher competencies.
2. the incoherent but insistent way the good teacher is now defined under neoliberal governance by teacher registration authorities.
3. proposals for a new understanding of good teachers: based on understanding the labour process and occupational dynamics of teaching, the intellectual structure of Education studies, and the overall logic of education itself

• This consensus might suggest that governments wanting to improve education would be pouring vast resources into teacher education. But that hasn’t happened.
  • What has happened, in Australia as in other wealthy countries, is the construction of an imposing new apparatus of certification and regulation for teachers.

Part 1: the changing idea of the good teacher
From servant to scholar-teacher

In an admirable study called The Good Teacher, Moore (2004) finds three competing discourses in contemporary England:

• a ‘competent craftsperson’ [‘compliant technician’] model, preferred by government;
• the ‘scholar-teacher’ model a ‘reflective practitioner’ model, widespread in universities;
• and a ‘charismatic’ model of the teacher, circulating in popular culture, Hollywood movies, etc.

[Australia] The new mass school systems were interventions into a turbulent colonial society, designed to achieve social control over working-class and rural youth who might easily escape it.

• Little value was placed on a capacity for independent thought. The good teacher at this time was, above all, an obedient servant of the authorities.

• The technical-professional model of teaching thus became linked with an ideology of educational hierarchy, of natural differences in intelligence or educability, that had socially conservative overtones.
  • This sat awkwardly with the trend of educational reform in the following generation, which saw a postwar surge in working-class demand for education, the rapid growth of comprehensive high schools from the 1950s to the 1970s, moves towards gender equality, and the opening of universities and colleges.

The shift to a ‘competent teacher’ model

[Via IE/TE] 1980s, distinct skills or competencies were extracted from the matrix of traditional apprenticeships, packaged and taught as separate modules.

• Specific, measurable outcomes, rather than broad trade-based identities, became the goal of vocational education.
• KF: we cannot measure the most important aspects of teaching

An ‘audit culture’ emerged. Under neoliberalism, auditing has been rapidly extended to a very wide range of issues, far beyond the monetary accounting with which it began (Power, 1997).

• derived from the muddled discourse of ‘excellence’ in corporate management – that there is always a ‘best practice’ that can be instituted and audited from above.

• The consequences for teacher education are potentially very large. A list of auditable competencies can become the whole rationale of a teacher education programme.
  • There is no need, in such a model, for any conception of Education as an intellectual discipline.
  • There is no need for cultural critique, since the market, aggregating individual choices, decides what services are wanted and what are not.
  • There is a limited role for educational research, mainly to conduct positivist studies to discover ‘best practice’.
• But there is no need for the competent teacher to be able to reflect on the bodies of knowledge from which the school curriculum derives.
  • That is the business of the central authorities, which audit the outcomes of the schools’ work.

Part 2: how the good teacher is defined in the new registration regime

• the idea that teachers can be sorted into a hierarchy of professional levels is a major formal component of the notion of standards made operational by the Institutes.
  • The stratification of the workforce that is sought by neoliberal agendas of individual competition among workers is thus built into the definition of teacher professionalism.
• Some sentences are hybrid within themselves. From the same list, ‘Be aware of how curriculum and assessment is structured to support learning’ suggests a piece of organizational know-how. But it also embeds an attitude, i.e. accepting that curriculum and assessment are structured to support learning.
  • Would a student teacher who concluded that the current system of assessment actively interferes with learning (as it probably does, for at least half the students in our schools), meet the professional standard? I would hope so, but the Standards documents do not encourage me to believe so. The cautions, admonitions and invitations to conformity heavily outnumber the invitations to take wing.
• But their language is much more strongly influenced by corporate managerialism. The texts are heavy with ’‘challenges’, ‘goals’, ‘stakeholders’, ‘partnerships’, ‘strategies’, ‘commitment’, ‘capacity’, ‘achievable’, ‘effective’, ‘flexible’, and ‘opportunities’…It is telling that the Victorian document from which I have been quoting frequently mentions ‘profession’ but never mentions ‘union’.

Part 3: towards a new understanding of good teachers
1. The work of teaching

• Teaching is a form of labour, undertaken in specific workplaces, in certain employment relations.
  • Teacher education is the making of a workforce.
• teaching is embodied labour, in which the physical presence of the teacher in interaction with the student is important
• This is a hidden risk in the current pressure on teachers (in universities too) to be entrepreneurs, endlessly rising to ‘challenges’, doing more with less, endlessly competing for advancement.
  • Good teaching must be sustainable; and that can only be planned when we see teaching as a practicable labour process.
• teaching involves a great deal of emotion work

whether an individual teacher appears to be performing well depends a great deal on what other people are doing.

2. The occupational dynamics of teaching

• the idea of teaching as a profession has always been ambivalent; it may enshrine dependence as much as autonomy
• They codify teachers’ work and teacher education in such a way as to make them auditable and allow control at a distance.
  • how teacher professionalism is defined, and by whom, is important

Given the diversity of the pupils and their communities, a school should have among its teachers a range of ethnicities, class backgrounds, gender and sexual identities, age groups and levels of experience. Any definition of teacher quality, any system of monitoring or promotion, that tends to impose a single model of excellence on the teaching workforce – whatever that model may be – is likely to be damaging to the education system as a whole.

• the informal processes by which practical know-how is passed to new teachers in on-the-job learning (a major part of teacher education, which formal teacher education can support)
  • KF: SA/FA relationships
• A lively occupational culture among teachers is not a given. It needs to be fostered, and it can be damaged.
  • KF: BCTEA

3. The intellectual structure of education

• One of the virtues of the scholar-teacher model was its clear account of Education as a field of knowledge.
• The reflective-practitioner approach, though less interested in the overall organization of knowledge, has focussed on how occupational knowledge can be developed in teachers’ practice.
• The neoliberal agenda and the competent-teacher model have abandoned these problems.

• The audit culture in education construes teachers as technicians, enacting pre-defined ‘best practice’ with a pre-defined curriculum measured against external tests – a situation for which skill, but not intelligence, is required.
• What teachers do in schools is never just conveying a set of facts to pupils. Teachers necessarily interpret the world for, and with, their pupils.
  • This is obvious in early childhood education. But it is equally true in the most technical subjects in high school, where interpretation is embedded in the language, selection of objects of knowledge, and mental operations characteristic of a given subject area.
• Interpreting the world for others, and doing it well, requires not just a skill set but also a knowledge of how interpretation is done, of the cultural field in which it is done, and of the other possibilities of interpretation that surround one’s own
• It has been increasingly recognized that teachers in schools can and should function as their own researchers.
  • Knowledge and its applications in teaching are inherently dynamic.

4. The process of education

• education is understood fundamentally as social reproduction – transmitting the culture to a new generation, producing the workforce, or handing on the traditions.
• There is some truth in these ideas; but more fundamentally still, education is a process of forming a culture.

Education is a process that creates social reality, necessarily producing something new. Education is part of the process that steers a society through historical time.

Questions about the goals of education are questions about the direction in which we want a social order to move, given that societies cannot avoid changing. This is where questions of privilege and social justice in education arise; they are fundamental to the project, not add-ons.

• An adequate concept of good teaching, then, includes teachers’ roles in the social action required to create good learning environments for children.
  • Indeed, who better than teachers to know what is needed, to create good learning environments for children?
  • Teachers, I would argue, have a collective responsibility here, and teacher education has a responsibility to support it.