دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی برنامه درسی به عنوان حرفه گرایی در زمینه: دو معلم ابتدایی در قبرس - تیلور و فرانسیس 2018

ABSTRACT

In this paper, two case studies of elementary school teachers in the Republic of Cyprus are constructed to discuss how curriculum making relates to teacher biographies and sense of professionalism, as those are shaped at the intersection of their professional history and projections for the future, informed by and informing their constitution as professionals in local institutional and broader social contexts. Drawing on the ecological model of teacher agency, the two cases are utilised to examine how teachers’ narrated professional experiences in past and current schools were at interplay with their general sense of professional role and purpose as teachers. This complex interplay is simultaneously connected to the ways they perceived and constituted their pupils as well as to the ways they themselves were constituted by others as professionals. The examination of the two cases foregrounds the notions of teacher agency and of curriculum making as contingent, negotiated and negotiable, and opens up the space to consider the politics of both as those are permeated by micro-processes of subjection and subjectivation.

Discussion

The cases we constructed for Anna and Niki help us to problematise typologies or categorisations of professionalism as, for instance, managerial vs. democratic (Day & Sachs, 2004), or extended vs. restricted (Evans, 2008), by showing how porous the ‘boundaries’ between these categorisations are. They are further helpful for challenging the ‘spatial’ border implied in these categorisations between ‘the classroom’, ‘the school’, ‘the community’, ‘the social’ contexts, since, as we have exemplified in the cases of both Anna and Niki, each of these contexts is nested in and open to each other. The two teachers’ decisions in the classroom are shaped by how they have been perceived and recognised in their (past and present) schools, how they repeatedly re-enacted such recognisable ‘identities’ (see, e.g. Niki’s constitution as a good first grade teacher as well as her reiteration of the ‘teacher of the school’ rather than ‘of a classroom’) and the ‘role’ or ‘mission’ of school in the broader social context. Their enactment of professionalism as professionality is shaped by their own professional biographies and beliefs (e.g. school contexts, past experiences and training), but it is also shaped by and simultaneously shapes broader historical and historicised notions of professionalism as these have emerged in the context of Cyprus. The historical conceptualisation of the teacher as a public servant in Cyprus relates to Anna’s reported mission of the school to ameliorate for the social and emotional/psychological needs of pupils and families, as a provision of public service perceived as social service. This sets the teaching profession in a particular relation to the state as a profession primarily of social work.