What Teachers Know: Rethinking the Legal Consensus That Teachers Are Not Full Professionals

• In Event: Frameworks for Teacher Leadership

Abstract

Despite claims made by educators, teacher associations, and researchers, the overwhelming consensus in legal practice is that teachers are not full professionals. Definitions of what a full profession is vary, but nearly all require the professional to possess specialized technical knowledge, which justifies the self-regulation of the field by its practitioners. Drawing on existing critiques of educational practices that do not reflect the values and lives of the communities that teachers serve, I argue that the knowledge teachers need to ethically support learning in unjust societies serves as an appropriate epistemic basis for full professional status.

Author

• Nicolas Jordan Tanchuk, University of Winnipeg