The Meaning of Work for Teachers Teaching across the Americas.

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: The power of transnational experiences in morphing teacher identity and teaching practice

Proposal

This study uses evidence from 93 teachers from two geographical settings (the US and Latin America [Chile, Peru, and Bolivia]), two professional statuses (priest and lay), and three time periods of their work (before 1965, between 1965 and 1990, and between 1990 and 2016), which makes up the body of interview data. These teachers all work in well-resourced schools where most material needs are met and where most students come from families of higher social, cultural, and economic capital. In many cases, salary is not the teachers’ primary concern. These are teachers whose meanings of work are found in contexts where material resources abound.
All the meanings of work I uncover here are founded on a common understanding of education as formation, and in these cases, the teachers understand and express their role as that of a formator. At the outset of this chapter, I provide an explanation of what is meant here by education as formation, and I elaborate on why it is so central to the teachers in this study. I subsequently explain each of the sources of the meaning of teachers’ work, relying on the teachers’ narratives and end by discussing the results with a focus on the comparisons among different types of teachers in the study.
Teachers make meaning of their work in several ways. The teachers interviewed match the categories that operate as sources of meaning developed by Rosso et al. (2010). Teachers do make meaning out their relationships with others—students, colleagues, and/or society, and they also find meaning when their work impacts their own sense of self, i.e., in filling fulfilled, helpful, or appreciated. The teachers studied also refer to the work context and their spirituality as dimensions that serve as significant bases for meaning in their work.
The intersection of those variables and the different types of teachers—assuming the limitations of the qualitative nature of the data—reveals that is not primarily professional status or geographical setting that makes a difference between teachers in the study, but the time in which they taught or have been teaching plays a much more significant role. It is not a matter of who or where, but more a matter of when they teach. In the 1960s, the world was changing, the Catholic church was changing, and so, too, were the Jesuit high schools and those who taught in these institutions.
Work context, spiritual life, and the self-regard dimensions of meaning in work are dimensions that vary across professional status, geographical setting, and time-period. Those dimensions show us how culture, temporality, and being either a priest or lay person matter at the moment of evaluating the meaning of teachers’ work. Looking to students and society as sources of meaning expresses the consistency of the base categories in which teachers in the study make meaning of being a teacher, independence of culture, temporality, or professional status.

Author

• Cristobal Madero, University of California, Berkeley / Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile