The Place Model | Who is my teacher today?

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Proto Professionals

Proto-professionals: early transit point of career or comfortable place for entire career?

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Local Heroes or little more than Robots?

  • Historical fiction example form Oliver Goldsmith’s (1770) highly esteemed village schoolmaster, who was a described as a local statesman and much admired by the adoring villagers: and still they gazed and still the wonder grew that one small head could carry all he knew. His work was clearly built on strong, local roots, knowing generations of pupils and their families, whilst having little or no connection to a wider world and being able to bring little beyond local knowledge to their pupils. Today this knowledge could be googled.
  • Today: the change in locus of teacher education in the US and in England from the universities to schools, coupled with the development of more rigidly defined school curricula which may be formulaically delivered by teachers, working as mere technicists (Winch et al., 2013) or deliverologists (Pring, 2013), temporary technician teachers of other people’s children (Zeichner, 2014). A more dystopian view sees the prescribed competences of technicist teachers being, in future, effortlessly ‘delivered’, not by teachers, but by robots.

High Status

Vertical Axis

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Status

  • Teachers will have much less agency in respect of the vertical axis, which depends on the exigencies of public opinion of teacher status.
  • This axis is not about remuneration.
  • A subjective judgment of status based on estimations of public perceptions of the esteem in which teachers (individually or collectively) are held, from low to high.

Professionals

The Professionals

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My original conception of this group was one of idealism, but I have gradually come to understand a need to bifurcate this group to include, on the one hand, yet another dystopian subgroup (the exclusive professionals) and on the other, a utopian one (the inclusive professionals).

Local Restricted
Professional

Horizontal Axis

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Professional Learning Journey

  • Based on Eric Hoyle’s heuristic comparison (1983) of restricted (focused on their own classroom, practice and autonomy) and extended (concerned with wider society, collegiality and learning through CPD) professionality.
  • The axis is not a timeline, not a history, it is not a matter of passive survival for 30-40 years in the classroom, gathering up a few tips and tricks about good teaching on the way. It is about building teachers’ professional knowledge, skills and values.
  • Learning process is a developing place, and, it must be stressed, not a space, using Yi-Fu Tuan’s lucid formula: Place = Space + Meaning (Tuan, 1977).
  • This place may be conceived on either personal or profession-wide scales – an individual’s career or the systemic capacities for professional learning of teachers who can increasingly bring the world to their pupils and their pupils to the world.

Exclusive Professionals

Inclusive Professionals

Exclusive/Inclusive

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Exclusive professionals: may be seen as highly expert and polished, but also as being self-serving, market-cornering, unapproachable and aloof. This conception of professionals not a recent phenomenon, with George Bernard Shaw declaring in 1906 that all professions are a conspiracy against the laity.

Inclusive Professionals: It is, I believe, possible to conceive of a contrasting 'inclusive professionalism' which is, even at its highest levels of expertise and esteem, populated by and of service to all. This concept may yet prove to be an oxymoron, destined for a cul-de-sac of impossibility, because exclusivity may turn out to be an essential ingredient of the professions.

This concept may yet prove to be an oxymoron, destined for a cul-de-sac of impossibility, because exclusivity may turn out to be an essential ingredient of the professions.

Glocal Extended
Professional

Precarious Professionals

No Teacher

No Teacher

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NOTE: For the purposes of this paper, only those who are 'qualified' to teach are deemed to be teachers although it is important to recognize that there is little agreement as to what makes a teacher 'qualified'.

The Poor

  • Across the globe there is an almost insatiable demand for teachers (Moon & Umar, p. 227 in Moon, 2013) and some 57 million primary-level learners are not being taught by a teacher.
  • The impediments to schooling for all learners are well documented (UNESCO, 2014): Poverty, illness, disability, gender, cultural issues, child labour, transportation, migration, disasters and conflict.

No Teacher Needed?

  • Some academics have suggested that teachers are completely unnecessary most notably in the Hole in the Wall Project which began with a computer which was embedded in a wall of a kiosk within a slum area in Kalkaji, New Delhi, India.
  • MOOCs (Massive, Open, Online Courses) has brought free access to courses ‘taught’ by eminent teachers. However, these are often unaccredited, short-term ventures which deploy reduced pedagogies which often emphasise only drill and practice – well suited to Robots.

Home Schooling and Truancy

  • In the UK, as in many other counties, education is compulsory, but attending school is not. Those providing home education (often a child’s parents/guardians) do not have to be qualified to do so nor are they required to follow a formal curriculum. Pupils may also choose to absent themselves from school, and many do truant.

Precarious Professionals

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Unprofessionals

  • The reality of schooling for many learners challenges the assumption, often backed by policy, coercion and sanction, that mass public schooling is an unquestionable good and the corollary that all teachers act in the best interests of all learners.
  • Alhamdan et al., (2014), describe the misuse of power to beat, insult or verbally abuse their students (Oman), a lack of dedication to the profession, inefficient functioning at school and irresponsibly taking leave (Bangladesh), teachers who were not proud of the teaching profession (South Africa), and sexual misconduct (Australia, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia).

Transient teachers

  • Teacher retention in the poorest countries remains a persistent problem, where teachers are often badly paid, inadequately supported and held in such low esteem that many are forced to consider other career options.
  • These issues are also found in the most developed countries, particularly during periods of strong economic growth, although there is considerable variation both within and between countries and teacher shortages are often greatest in science subjects.

Low Status

De-Professionalised

The De-professionalised

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This quadrant in which teachers have completed a significant part of their professional learning journey, but nonetheless may be deemed to have low status, is the locus of at least three contrasting sets of examples:

  • the staffroom cynics whose words and attitudes can discourage young teachers and de-motivate pupils
  • those senior teachers and teacher educators who have been ‘demoted’ to this place (for example, by politicians’ derision)
  • and migrant/refugee teachers who find themselves deemed ‘unqualified’ and unemployable in their destination country.

Papers

Books

Clarke, L. (2017) Mapping teacher status and career-long professional learning: The Place Model, Discourse

This paper engages with key contemporary debates about teaching and teacher education through proposing an innovative, interdisciplinary model, the Place Model, which uses two senses of ‘place’ to provide comparative lenses for a timely, a priori examination of the place of the teacher: place in the humanistic geography tradition as a process – a cumulative, career-long professional learning journey – and, also, place in the sociological sense of teacher status. This page shows how the sections of the model might be speculative ‘populated’ with a range of exemplars in a way which raises important questions about conceptions of teachers across the globe, and provides an alternative and original vision of the profession which highlights salient dystopias and ideals of professionalism from the perspective of the pupil. Whist undeniably reductionist in nature (like many models) the Place Model presents a usefully uncluttered professional landscape which is mapped in a way which is intentionally schematic or diagrammatic rather than mathematical in nature (although it does look like a graph), a heuristic rather than a positivist equation. Like all maps, it is subjective, like all models it is wrong. Nevertheless, it does provide a framework within which a range of key local and global issues may usefully be compared and contrasted.