Teachers’ work, recognition and development in schools. Connecting individual & collective professional learning.

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

Successive crisis contexts contributed in various settings to a collective awareness of the importance of education and the transmission of values of justice and equity in the construction of societies that are both more inclusive and more enlightened about the major challenges of the time. Education is called upon to promote interpersonal skills such as cooperation, solidarity, as well as subject knowledge and skills analysis, critical thinking, participation, deliberation and inclusion, all of which contribute to the formation of teachers and learners who are enlightened, responsible and active in society.
In such a context, most policies worldwide emphasize the need to equip teachers to work effectively in a highly diverse classroom context.
This book deals with the very much-debated topic in the Francophone world of teachers' work and professional development in schools. The basis of this work is a Francophone insight into the concepts of teachers’ work and professional development and learning, in dialogue with other linguistic areas' approaches. The book is nourished by abundant theoretical and empirical works with echoes of research conducted in other countries of the francophonies.
The main purpose of the book is to draw up an international scientific inventory of the continuing professional development of teachers in the French-speaking world, focusing on research devoted to the tension between the individual and the collective in the work of teachers and the development of cooperative skills in learning and professional practice.
What does Francophone research teach us about the motives, objectives, forms and effects of this promotion of new conceptions of teachers’ work in the professional development of teachers? How do these developments challenge long standing conceptions of teaching and schooling?
The promotion of the collective dimension of teachers' work is also linked to an acute need for teacher recognition. Supporting change and professional and organizational innovation therefore has mobilizing effects, but on the condition of differential recognition of teachers, with a view to building individual and collective capacities. This book intends to shed light on the dynamics and contemporary developments of the contrasting analytical perspectives that research on this subject is drawing. Finally, the question of teaching work, between the individual and the collective, intersects with that of collective representation, especially union representation. It then meets the cardinal questions of taking into account the dignity and integrity of individuals at work. Thus, teachers’ work contemporary dynamics are examined against the background of a crisis of professional and political representation, and an aspiration to social recognition. The particularly virulent teachers’ protest movements in France, called ‘red pens’, or on a more global level the ‘yellow vests’ movement, are emblematic expressions of this phenomenon.
Through the empirical and theoretical echoes gathered, this book wishes to offer an analytical look at the contemporary teaching condition: from the individual to the collective, the relationship of trust between society and the profession, the ambivalence of the rhetoric of their professional development, of collective work, its impacts on the members of the profession.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Book Launch

Chair

• Allan J Pitman, University of Western Ontario

Co-author or Non-Presenter

• Alice Le Coz, Inspe /université de Bordeaux

Book Launch Presenter

• Régis Malet, University of Bordeaux