Seminar 6: What can be learnt from comparative analysis?
Tuesday Dec 13th 9:30 - 5:00
Kings College London, Franklin Wilkins Building Rm 3.7
Seminar Report
This seminar considered the insights that cross-national comparison can offer understandings
of changing teacher roles and identities in UK contexts. It was the sixth seminar in the
Changing Teacher Roles, Identities and Professionalism (C-TRIP) TLRP thematic seminar
series and was attended by 39 participants who heard the following papers:
Agnes van Zanten:
Jo-Anne Dillabough:
The new generation of teachers in France: views on
professionalism in a changing policy context
Symbols of domesticity and the work of women teachers
in global times
Ken Jones:
Teachers’ work, roles and professional identities: comparing
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
Clive Harber:
Teacher Roles, Identities and Professionalism: lessons from the
comparative study of Africa
Ian Menter:
Tradition, culture and identity in the reform of teachers' work in
Scotland and England
This report pulls together notes submitted by the rapporteurs of the 3 discussion
groups and the notes of general discussions following paper presentations and the
plenary session.1 A very wide range of issues were raised during the day and it will
not be possible to do all of them full justice in these notes – as always many of them
have appeared previously and will clearly reappear in future sessions.
As earlier reports have indicated there has been much discussion about the importance
of bringing comparative perspectives to bear on the analysis of professionalism and
professional identity. This seminar was explicitly formulated with a view to
addressing such issues directly. Experiences and reflections from France, Canada,
Africa, Scotland and other UK jurisdictions were all represented. These both
complemented and extended papers which had been presented in earlier sessions and
had frequently picked up on questions of generalisability and specificity in local,
national, regional and transnational terms. The groups had a range of facilitating
questions which were intended to provide a focus for their discussions although, as
1
With thanks to Sarah Smart, Heather Mendick, Jenny Reeves and Caroline Norrie.
always, there was no intention that these should be laboriously followed or covered.
Some themes of the questions were as follows:
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what generalisations about professionalism and professional identity is it
possible to draw across national contexts and teaching forces which are
differentiated in so many ways?
what are the main strengths and insights which can be gained from
comparative perspectives?
are there risks and dangers entailed in comparative analyses? How can these
be identified and minimised, if not avoided?
in the English context there is much discussion, both in education and more
widely, about the relationship between public-service managerialism and
public-service professionalism. What do comparative perspectives reveal
about these distinctions?
with regard to current UK debates about “new professionalism” what might be
learnt from comparison between the different UK national systems and from
experiences and developments in other countries? How does the relationship
between the social and policy contexts in which teachers work and their
professional practice appear in other national/international contexts and for
different cohorts of teachers?
what might be the linkages between the global and the local in relation to
policy developments which currently impinge upon the professional identity
and working lives of teachers?
The groups reported that the form and nature of their discussions to some extent
reflected the national and local identities of the people who were members of the
group. Certain themes were returned to in all of the discussions but they could take
quite diverse forms depending upon the constitution and composition of the group.
However, all of the groups stressed the importance of context in grasping the nature
of what it means to be ‘professional’ and to understand the nature of ‘professional
identity.’
Comparative Analysis
All of the groups spent time discussing the contribution of comparative insights in
analysing social phenomena, in our case, ‘professionalism’. It is all too easy to
presume that the presuppositions and orientations which we bring to such analysis is
both self-evident and common-sense. An example of such questioning was raised by
the discussion of violence and schooling which took place during the seminar. A
paper had stressed the ways in which schooling operated within a history and
contemporary expression of violence. It was also pointed out that acts of violence
were visited upon pupils by teachers but also upon teachers by both pupils/students
and other members of the community. Issues such as these raise important but often
submerged questions about the status, nature and form of professionality in such
contexts. One group pointed out that it may be that “the best use of comparative
analysis may be seeing your own context in a new light and, as ethnographers say,
making the familiar strange.” Or in the words of another of the groups:
What stories from the margins etc. reveal is that ‘things don’t have to be this
way’. They allow for different stories and practices and for new affiliations
and alliances. Comparative research (or rather research which communicates
different situated knowledges) counters monolithic accounts and opens up
options, choices, hopes?? Hence the danger of ‘comparative’ research that
smooths out difference across sites (by choosing categories or themes that
cut through the structures of local variations) in depressing critique and
contestation.
Throughout the seminar series we have constantly had to recognise that the
experiences, working lives and policy frameworks within which teachers are
embedded vary hugely across geographical contexts. Without comparative
contributions it is only too easy to reach conclusions which are founded upon
assumptions that we are all talking about the same, shared phenomena or that we are
locked into descriptions which are entirely specific to one particular set of
national/local circumstances. Nonetheless, participants were well aware of the risks
and uncertainties entailed in undertaking comparisons. As one group put it:
Adequately describing the complexity of international/national contexts
without reductionism was seen as challenging.
A number of groups pointed out that such ‘risks’ could be thrown into particularly
sharp relief when the discussions were focused on contexts and circumstances which
were far removed from ‘our’ everyday experiences. Material, economic, social,
cultural and political circumstances may be so varied as to render it problematic to
use, for example, a common discourse of professionality. This does not mean that
such a discourse is (necessarily) ruled out-of-court but that it requires an interpretation
and meaning which is particular to those circumstances. In a highly differentiated and
heterogeneous world these are genuinely taxing, but essential, problematics. One
group highlighted these issues in the following way:
There was some exploration of the tension between ‘grand narratives’ of
globalisation at supra-national level and their relationship to local narratives.
Indeed how local is local – you can look at a continuous focusing down in
scale. Is comparative analysis a valid activity – does it eliminate more than
it illuminates?
They went on to claim that the exercise should be aimed at:
Preserving/describing the whole case in its integrity rather than excising bits
to meet pre-determined analytical categories.
Policy in Context
Given all of the reservations about easy comparisons, however, all of the groups
expressed the view that comparison was both desirable and enlightening. There was a
good deal of discussion about the ways in which such comparisons highlighted how
policies and practices were developed and implemented. For example, the following
tendencies were considered by one group:
There was discussion of the contradictions in current English policy, with
the discourse of choice, and the rise of interest groups, especially faith-based
groups in education set against a prescriptive centralised programme of
study and a focus on standards and exams. The rise of these groups was felt
to be particularly interesting given the secular nature of many other
educational systems, …
This was clearly an area that this group felt would merit fuller comparative
exploration and would also have direct relevance to the ways in which teachers’
working lives and identities were being reconfigured. This was also looped back to
discussions about globalisation and the possible impact of WTO/GATS agreements
on education and its future architecture.
The papers stimulated debate about the extent to which policy was a screen
and many educational changes were the result of differing efforts to respond
to globalisation. [It was argued that] In France there has been a rejection of
big education policies, whereas England is enmeshed in big initiatives.
Another group related this quite explicitly to overall themes which had threaded
through past seminars when they said:
We felt that there could be a lot to be gained from comparative work on the
role of the head teacher … and also, more broadly, comparative work on
teachers in a range of management positions and how they mediate policy,
whether through compliance or subversion.
The question of resistance was one which was raised in a number of the discussion
groups as it has been throughout the series. Once again it was stressed that, although
teachers might be finding that there was an increasing impact of regulation,
assessment and surveillance as a feature of their working lives, this would take
varying forms in different socio-political contexts, which could lead to quite different
forms of local ‘resistances’. It was also noted that these tendencies had their effects in
terms of social fragmentation and the suppression of political engagement and the
papers on Canada, France and African schooling were drawn upon to illustrate these
arguments. One group expressed its recognition of these points in the following
manner:
The group commented on the role of religion, marketisation and unions in
different systems. For example, the myth of English teacher union
vanguardism was compared to Scotland, where the main union has opened
up an educational space for discussion, by re-branding itself through pushing
its CPD remit. Discourses in France and Scotland were felt to have a more
public service outlook, while in England teachers’ duty was seen to be to the
children in their school [and their individual achievements].
Discussions such as these took groups back to a consideration of the patterns of
diversity in experience within the UK itself and the consequences for teachers (and
pupils) within the different jurisdictions. One group expressed this point in the
following research-oriented way:
The group felt that there is a missed opportunity in the UK to study the
different impact of policy in different parts of the union and compared the
UK to a “mini laboratory” in this respect.
Whilst it was argued that comparisons within systems were frequently as important as
comparisons across systems it was also stressed that teachers who occupied similar
situations in very different systems might have experiences which were directly
comparable:
… there might be more similarities, in some cases, within groups of teachers
across different countries than between teachers in the same country; for
example, cross national comparisons of those who had to mediate between
policy and school level might show more similarities than differences in the
roles they played and the dilemmas they faced.
Another group drew on the papers which related to Scotland and France to formulate
the following comparisons and to relate these to the political, cultural and ideological
situations within which teachers found themselves.
The reflectivity of teachers in different national contexts was discussed. It
was reported that research from Scotland has found young teachers to be
most reflective and older, male teachers the least reflective. In France a
trend for greater reflectivity in younger teachers was described, however this
was seen to correspond with indecision, inaction and weakened capacity to
negotiate reforms. This is connected to a reported loss of faith in the power
of democracy and disillusionment with the gap between rhetoric and reality,
for example over equality in schools.
Representations of teachers and teaching
Although people found that there was only a limited time to follow up these
discussions they were intrigued by the idea of tracing the ‘identification/s’ of teachers
through the media of fiction, drama and cultural products in general. It was felt that
fiction offered a powerful source of insight into teachers’ identities, lives and work.
One group expressed their views on this in the following manner:
We felt that fiction would be a good way to research these issues across a
range of cultural contexts and that it offered possibilities for examining the
interaction between the personal and the role. More than that we felt that it
makes it possible to access material that you cannot get at through other
forms of academic research. … there are difficulties with the use of fiction;
it raises methodological and epistemological questions, particularly about
the nature of truth and reality. Also the lack of academic credibility accorded
to fictional source material is problematic for those citing it.
Clearly these were matters which could have sustained much fuller discussion and
would add important dimensions to current debates about the contemporary and
historic constructions of professional identity/ies and professionalism.