Raewyn Connell

Time 2021-01-17 05:03:22

Web Name: Raewyn Connell

WebSite: http://www.raewynconnell.net

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In this essay I discussthe nature of teaching and the circumstances of teachers' work and lives. Itwas written as a submission to the 2020 Inquiry Valuing the TeachingProfession, sponsored by the NSW Teachers' Federation. The essay builds onrecent debates and writing about teachers, on my experience as a researcherconcerned with school education, and on what I have learned as a teacher in thetertiary sector.Teachers'WorthTeachers'cultural positionIn graduationceremonies for Education degrees, the invited speaker often includes a fanfarefor the teaching profession, telling the graduands they are bearers of culturaltraditions, mentors of the rising generation and gatekeepers to the future.These ideas sound like clichés, but they are not just boilerplate. Teachers dohave a central role in the culture.Ever since massschool systems became a reality, teachers have been the main agents for thegrowth of literacy, the formation of skilled and professional workforces, thebroad dissemination of sciences and humanities, and a large part of youngpeople's social learning. Teachers' work underpins our society's achievementsin public health, economic and technological development, literature, music andart. In a society with many regional, ethnic and religious differences,teachers' work in schools is essential for social connection and cohesion. Therole is so broad and so important that when social troubles emerge, politiciansand journalists often blame teachers for causing the problems, or require teachersto fix them.In social-science discussions,teaching is sometimes defined as the archetypal 'new profession'. School teachersare trained knowledge workers, now usually with university degrees. They are unionized,wage-earning rather than fee-earning, employees rather than self-employed, mainlyworking in the public sector, with high proportions of women and entrants fromworking-class backgrounds. All these points have to be qualified in detail, butthey are broadly correct. Teachers as a group not only perform important tasksfor society but have themselves been significant players in economic and socialchange.Teaching is in onesense the best-known profession of all. In a society where almost every childgoes to school, almost every adult has had a close-up view of teachers doingtheir daily work - or at least, part of it. Many adults hold great affectionfor particular teachers who were important in their lives. But other memoriesmay be negative, even angry. Many people also imagine, from a limitedknowledge, that teaching is an easy job with short hours and long holidays,something that anyone could do, only needing quick-and-dirty training. Thepublic image of teachers is genuinely complicated.Teaching asworkIf you enter teachers and work together into the widely-used bibliographical database GoogleScholar you will find over four million references in the English languagealone. There are two hundred and eighty thousand references if you use thephrase teachers' work as an exact search term. I would judge that at most athousand items, perhaps less, form the core research-based literature. Thelarger figures illustrate how widely discussed teachers and their work are, andhow frequently questions about teachers connect with other educational issues,from curriculum to public policy, assessment, and pedagogical method.The sociology ofwork speaks of the 'labour process', which means not only which tasks theworker performs, but also, crucially, how these tasks are organized. Threefeatures of the teaching labour process are crucial. Teaching is interpersonal,composite, and unbounded. Forgive the jargon, I'll explain. (a) Teaching always involves connectionsbetween people: it consists of human encounters. These may be intense orformal, short or sustained, one-to-one or one-to-many, even some-to-many (inteam-teaching). Whatever their form, the element of encounter is always there. Encounteris interactive. Pure top-down instructionis part, but only a minimal part, of actual teaching.To play aneffective role in someone else's learning, the teacher must learn what thepupil's current capacities and motivations are, and what the pupil needs to takethe next step in learning. Then again, for the step after that; and so on. Theteacher's capacity to learn about the pupils is a crucial element inteaching, perhaps the most important element of all in effective teaching. Themore diverse the cohort of pupils, the greater the professional demand upon theteacher in sustaining the pupils' learning. (b) Teaching is a composite labourprocess. Close-focus ethnographic research in schools has made this clear. Anyteacher giving a detailed account of a working day could demonstrate it too! Inday-to-day classroom time, teachers do multiple forms of work, often switchingvery fast between them and sometimes doing several tasks at once.Classroom workincludes the complex intellectual labour of understanding the pupils andtransforming the curriculum into classroom practice; this is the most easilyrecognized part of the job. But the job also requires (as more recent studiesemphasise) emotional labour: creating connection with class members throughshared interest, encouragement, humour and sometimes anger; keeping focus inthe classroom by managing pupils' boredom, excitement or distraction; dealingwith conflict in the class and the effects of tension and trauma in the pupils'lives. As well as the intellectual and emotional labour, the teacher also hassignificant classroom administration: keeping records, managing equipment,providing materials, administering tests. It seems that the administrative labourhas increased in the last few decades, with growing official requirements fortesting and other forms of documentation. On top of all this are tasks outsidethe classroom. These are also varied, requiring a range of skills: preparationof classes, supervision in break times, organizing sports, arts and hobbygroups, arranging and supervising events, speaking with parents, readingofficial circulars, participating in staff meetings, attending in-serviceprogrammes, and so on. (c) Partly because of theinteractive and composite nature of the labour process, teaching is difficultto keep within bounds. Some of the job goes home in the briefcase at the end ofthe day: reports to write, assignments to mark, lessons to prepare. Some of thejob goes home in one's head: the knots and tangles of classroom life, thepupils who are slipping behind for no apparent reason, the thrills andsuccesses in the teaching process.All this is hard tolimit, since teachers know that what they do affects their pupils' lives, justas the Graduation Day speech said. The legendary first year out (which maytake more than one year) is a baptism of fire for many young teachers becauseof the workload and the emotional demands. Later on, even highly engaged andsuccessful teachers may find they burn out. There is a cumulative effect of thecomplexity and pressure. To survive in the long run, teachers have to find abalance between over-commitment and self-protection. Support from colleagues isimportant in finding this balance.Workforce andsituationThough mass mediaimages of teachers emphasise colourful individuals, good or bad (the movie DeadPoets Society has both), no teacher really works alone. As with many otherforms of labour, in teaching most effects are produced by the workforce as awhole. Any teacher in her classroom is building on the work of all the teacherswho have worked with those pupils before. What happens in the classroom isshaped by what happens in the next-door classroom and by the routines of the wholeschool, the discussion and planning that happens in staff meetings, theengagement of school principals and senior teachers, the daily work of officeand maintenance staff, the constant informal discussions and exchange ofinformation that happens in staffrooms and around the school office. Researchersrecognize this when they speak of schools as organizations and try tocharacterise school culture, climate or atmosphere.particular school is all the work of other schools, as well as systemadministrators, curriculum developers, specialist support staff, assessmentauthorities, teacher organizations, and teacher educators. The work of allthese groups frames what happens in any individual classroom. Education on amass scale, in a large public school system, can only happen because the workis done by this whole workforce - the collective worker in the jargon ofindustrial sociology. Each person's labour is dependent on, and supported by,the labour of many others.surprising that attempts to measure teacher effectiveness on an individualbasis run into trouble. The German sociologist Claus Offe showed half a centuryago the fundamental flaw in attempts to measure individual or even occupational-groupproductivity as a basis for wage determination in large-scale modernorganizations, and this applies to education systems.Across a largeschool system, teachers must deal with varied groups of pupils. One school islocated in a quiet, mostly White suburb with a high proportion of professionalsand managers, while another is in a crowded, multi-ethnic city area with a highproportion of recent migrants. Another is in a depressed rural area with high youthunemployment and very few resident professionals; and so on. Some of thestudents will be academically engaged, others in conflict with the school. Inany age group there will be students with disabilities, behaviour problems andcomplex wellbeing needs.I won't dwell onwhat everyone knows about inequality in Australia, but I do think it isimportant to recognize that social inequalities are educational issues.Poverty and wealth, remoteness, urban conditions, ethnic and religiousdifference, indigenous or settler background, physical difference anddisability - all these confront teachers with different conditions andcombinations of tasks in different schools. Private schools are able to choosehow much diversity they care to accommodate. But it is the nature of a publiceducation system that all groups of students must be included andsupported. The demands on teachers' professionalism and learning capacities aregreater.We have long knownthat in education, formal equality of provision does not mean equality ofoutcomes. In Australia we have an unfortunate history of segregated public andprivate school systems. The cynicalpolitical strategy of diverting public funds to support private schooling forthe more privileged makes our educational problems worse. One of the damagingthings it does is to divide the teaching workforce, creating separate careerpaths which limit rather than enrich professional experience.New pressuresTeachers and theirwork have long been subject to controls of various kinds: religious, political,managerial and professional. Not far back in history, teachers were expected toshow rigid conservatism in dress, manners and attitudes, in private life aswell as working hours. Some of this has changed, as teachers asserted their citizenrights. But teachers can still be targeted in moral panics, as the right-wing campaignagainst the Safe Schools programme in Australia showed. Contemporary concernsabout sexual abuse of children have required teachers to observe morerestrictive rules about physical contact with pupils in everyday school life.In the last fewdecades new means of regulation of teachers' work have developed, generallyinvolving control at a distance. This is euphemistically called accountability .On-line templates and information systems, heavier and more detailed reportingrequirements, standardized testing on a huge scale, quantitative targets andincentives, are now familiar in the education sector. Individual schools andteachers are supposed to have easily-measured goals and are made individuallyresponsible for achieving them, as if schools were Dickensian firms counting uptheir cash. School league tables are now familiar, such as those constructedfrom the appalling MySchool website ( supports national transparency andaccountability according to its front page, giving the game away). This systemconstantly confronts teachers with tension between government demands for competitivestandardized testing, and the need of the students for assessment tailored totheir actual learning situations and patterns of growth.Education systems havebeen subjected to requirements imported from other industries, with littleattention to their educational effects. Competition, privatisation,accountability, managerial prerogative and market choice are now the commonsense of corporate managers and form the dominant language of public policy, inAustralia as overseas. They have been powerfully reinforced by theglobalization agenda of the World Bank and the rich countries' economic thinktank the OECD (which now administers the PISA global testing system for schools- how did Education Ministers let that happen?).There is growingevidence about the impact of new technology on teachers' work. These changesare often hyped as modernization flowing from technological innovation. this isof course the view of the tech companies. Computers and the internet do offer manypossibilities for enrichment of teaching and learning of new skills. Whetherthese possibilities are realized is another matter. ICT in education must alsobe seen in the context of changing management practices and the rise ofcorporations that sell textbooks, curriculum materials, tests, journals andmanagement templates. There is formidable pressure here to standardize teachingpractices, discourage the messiness of experimentation and local engagement,and re-shape teaching as a measurable technical performance rather than acomplex human encounter. A few decades ago, we laughed at the insulting idea ofa 'teacher-proof curriculum'. We should laugh no more, as current ICT andcorporate strategies make it more feasible to reduce the skills ofteachers, while still maintaining a facade of performance.Careers andlivesIn education,situations and responses change over time, sometimes quite dramatically. Thisis brought out in histories of school systems, biographies of educators, andresearch on teaching careers. Research about careers often suggests thatteachers move through definite stages. They are supposed to pass from initialcareer choice, through initial training, to the first year out, adjusting tothe real world of teaching, developing technique and acquiring experience,specializing, gaining advancement and promotion, and eventual retirement. Thesethings do happen, of course! But the closer the focus, the more complex thechanges appear, and the less fixed the stages. It would be unrealistic to tieteacher's salaries and conditions to a rigid model of stages in careerdevelopment. We should be glad that there can be changes of direction, falsestarts, experiments and unorthodox pathways in the teaching workforce.One reason for thecomplexity of careers is teachers' lives outside school. Work/life balance canbe very problematic for beginning teachers, given the pressures of the firstyear out. Forming families and households may come at the same time as startingprofessional life. In Australian society work/life balance is constructedmainly as a dilemma for women, given the long-standing gender inequalities inthe load of housework and child- and elder-care (little changed even in theCOVID-19 lockdowns). We should be alert to the way apparently 'family-friendly'policies may actually reinforce these inequalities.Teaching as anoccupation does not escape gender divisions. Women predominate in earlychildhood and primary teaching, secondary teaching is more balanced, menpredominate at the upper levels of university teaching and in seniormanagement. In sectors where teaching is organized by subject areas, menpredominate in physical sciences and engineering-related fields, women inhumanities, social sciences and performing arts. These gender divisions becomean equity issue within the profession if the teaching of younger children isseen as less skilled work than the teaching of older students - for which I cansee no warrant at all - or if government concerns to boost STEM studies turninto wage/promotion incentives.Fifty years ago wecould have said that entry to the teaching profession in Australia wasoverwhelmingly from White Anglophone backgrounds, but also that it providedupward mobility for a significant group of working-class entrants. Morestudents from both Aboriginal communities and non-Anglophone migrantcommunities have now come through teacher education and into the profession,the public sector probably changing faster than the private sector. But withthe end of teaching scholarships and the rise of university fees and studentdebt, the sources of recruitment may become more restricted in social-classterms. If we value communication and sharing of experience across a diversepopulation, then having a socially representative teaching workforce seems animportant goal.In conclusionTeachers as agroup, rather than individually, have a formative role in social and economicprocesses. The central purpose of their labour is to help the rising generationdevelop their intellectual, social, practical and creative capacities, a taskthat is simultaneously vital, elusive and fantastically complex. Teachers haveto deploy a wide range of their own capacities - intellectual and emotional, manual,creative and practical - to do the job. Though pupils encounter teachers asindividuals, the work is in fact strongly collective and powerfully shaped bythe institutional system. It is no wonder that teachers' public image iscontradictory and that governments often reach for showy short-term solutionsto tough long-term educational problems.Teachers today haveto deal with changing technologies as well as shifting policies and managementpractices. In their daily work they face the consequences of declining supportfor human services, as they deal with diverse and changing school populations,the effects of migration, economic inequality and social trauma, and the needsin pupils' lives produced by colonization, racism, family violence,disabilities and community conflicts. It is an impressive sign of teacherprofessionalism that so much good teaching actually happens in our public schools. How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? What psychologicaldifferences now exist between women and men? How are masculinities andfemininities made? And how is gender entwined in global politics and debates over trans issues?Raewyn Connell one of the world's leading scholars in the field answers these questions and more. Her book provides asophisticated yet accessible introduction to modern gender studies, covering empirical research from allparts of the world, in addition to theory and politics. As well as introducing the field,Genderprovides a powerful contemporary framework for gender analysis with astrong and distinctive global awareness. Highlighting the multidimensional characterof gender relations, Connell shows how to link personal life with large-scaleorganizational structures, and how gender politics changes its form in changingsituations.The fourth edition of this influential book brings the statistical picture of gender inequalities up to date, and offers new close-focus case studies of gender research. Like previous editions, it examines gender politics and global power relations, but with added discussion around contemporary issues of intersectionality, populism, gender-based violence, trans struggles and environmental change. It also speaks at the intimate level, about embodied gender and personal relationships.Gendermoves from personal experience to globalproblems, offering a unique perspective on gender issues today. YES, FRIENDS, THAT'S THE OFFICIAL BLURB! YOU CAN FIND THE NEW EDITION HERE: https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509538997 The long-rumoured report on Australian military atrocitiesin the Afghanistan war has just been released (and immediately kicked down theroad by the national government). I have been thinking about why the Australianmilitary were there in the first place.It's a familiar story: "forward defence",stop-them-over-there, Defend Democracy, our government's need for some violenceto scare the voters with, and the same government's habit of doing whatever theAmerican government wants done... But then, why do we have wars anyway?So I have been reading Hermann Hesse. If you know his work -it's not so popular these days - you have probably read his mystical parable Siddhartha,his surreal psychological novel Steppenwolf (which has the best joke about classical music I have foundin literature), or his very strange, rather plodding but also eerie academicfantasy The Glass Bead Game. But the best of his writing that I know isin some essays first collected in 1946 (the year he was given the Nobel Prize)under the title Krieg und Frieden - war and peace.The English translation has a better title: If The WarGoes On. I have a paperback edition from 1978, much battered. The book hasa brilliant cover illustration showing a heap of armour and war machines, frommediaeval to WWII, abandoned in the snow, and in the background a WWI biplaneflying over Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.The title comes from two short pieces, one written late in1917 called "If the war goes on another two years", and one datedearly in 1918 called "If the war goes on another five years". Theyare time-travel short stories.In the first, Hesse goes away on an astral trip for twoyears, and comes back to find the war still running. Now nothing matters butthe war, which has mutated into random mass bombing from balloons. (Seems likea premonition of the vast destruction of German and Japanese cities, not tomention Stalingrad, from the air In WWII.)In the story, the author goes for a walk and is arrestedbecause he doesn't have an official permit to take a walk. He enters aKafka-esque world (think The Trial or The Castle) ofincomprehensible bureaucracy, finding he is in breach of multiple regulations,worst of all he doesn't have a legal permit to exist... Finally he is sent tothe top official, who explains that all the regulations have a reason: they areto preserve and safeguard the war.'Yes,' I said slowly, 'you've got something there. The war,in other words, is a treasure that must be preserved at any cost.' But why? Theofficial explains again: 'Only one answer is possible: the war is all we haveleft!'The second piece, in the form of an imaginary newspaperreport from the future, is shorter though the irony is just as fierce. (Now I'mreminded of Heinrich Böll's short novel End of a Mission.) By 1925 theregime is culling the elderly, in a programme for the 'elimination of citizensdemonstrably unfit for public service'. (Premonition again?) Police actionagainst one citizen who resists this programme leads to the discovery of hisson, who is a philosopher and poet working away quietly in a secluded home. Thisson is a phenomenon: the only European who has never heard about the war. Whencross-examined by the authorities, he thinks their stories about current eventsare fictions designed to test his mental condition. The newspaper reports thatthe University may decide to acquire him as the unique surviving case of anextinct species. "This 'pre-war man' will be subjected to thoroughinvestigation and perhaps preserved for science."War is a treasure, all we have left - and anyone outside itslogic is a bizarre exception - still? There might be something in it. Given allthose war movies and airport thrillers (not spy stories so much assecret-police stories), our mass media full of combat-style sports, thebreathless reports by correspondents from the latest front, the gun lobby andthe international arms trade. Not to mention the actual fighting. There seemsto be a case that the war did, indeed, go on...

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