Labor, Craft, and the Task of the Professional Educator

• In Event: Rearticulating the Vocation of Communication Professor: Discourses of Stability and Change

Abstract

This essay reclaims professional educational practice from action divorced from “real labor” for a sense of renewed engagement in the “work” of the classroom, ensuring the durability of a craft through passing it on to a new generation. A residual understanding of “professional” as a “managerial” state removed from engagement of “the task” is interrogated to reshape the idea of “professional educator.” The gift of the communication discipline is a framework permitting such a move.

Author

• Ronald Arnett, Duquesne University