Teaching is Both Public and Professional: How Can it be Both?

• In Event: Beyond Lortie: New sociological perspectives on professions and their application to teaching

Abstract

Objectives. This paper resolves the apparent contradiction between teaching as a closed, insular profession, and public education as an open, democratic enterprise. On the one hand, the complexity and uncertainty of classroom teaching speaks to teaching as a professional system defined by common theories, code, and tools. Teaching, in this paradigm, requires the type of expert community that characterizes professions ranging from dentists to accountants to airline pilots. Yet teachers are neither dentists nor pilots, and education is not only a professional enterprise but also a public one. Further, the public side of education is not a burden to be endured but integral to our democratic tradition. Can education be professional and democratic? This paper argues in the affirmative by showing that the contradiction between teaching as professional and democratic is not as intractable as it seems. In support of this position, the analysis leverages sociological work to posit a model of teaching that bridges its public and professional dimensions.

Theoretical Framework. The paper leans on theoretical work that distinguishes between specialized knowledge (i.e., expertise) and the professional community that claim ownership of it (i.e., the profession). This framework posits that the application of expert knowledge involves a network of professional and non-professional actors. Past research, for example, has highlighted the critical role played by activists in the development of AIDS treatments, and the way in which families and patients collaborated with psychiatrists in the discovery and classification of autism. In applying this frame, the paper ask not who controls the work of teaching, but how the teaching profession and the public can collaborate in ways that enable the application of expert knowledge to solve educational problems.

Methods. This paper is motivated by theoretical and empirical work. The analytic framework is informed by sociological literature into the professions and expertise. Starting with Abbott’s (1988) seminal work into the system of professions and concluding with Eyal’s acclaimed article on the discovery of autism, the analysis daws on broad sociological theory in which professions are increasingly understood as operating in interaction with social and political environments. To concretize the argument, the paper relies on two examples taken from previous empirical work into the Shelby County iZone and the Tennessee Achievement School District (author).

Results. Results show that the effective application of instructional expertise cannot be accomplished solely by the teaching profession, the community, or local government. Instead, the key to public education meeting its democratic and professional obligations is the formation of a “partnership” between the profession and the public in which all partners pursue reform efforts that reflect a combination of community values and professionally validated best practices.

Scholarly significance. The significance of the paper lies in its effort to reconceptualize the role of the teaching profession within the democratic and pluralistic nature of public education. The analysis posits a model legitimizing the necessity of an expert community of teachers while recognizing that educational goals can only be met with active involvement of the community and non-professional stakeholders.

Author

• Joshua L. Glazer, The George Washington University