The professional role and identity of teachers in the private and state education sectors

Connolly, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4278-1960 and Huges-Stanton, Joe 2020. The professional role and identity of teachers in the private and state education sectors. British Journal of Sociology of Education 41 (5) , pp. 717-732. 10.1080/01425692.2020.1764333

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Abstract

This paper compares the professional role and identity of teachers in private and state schools. It brings together theory within the sociology of the professions and approaches influenced by Basil Bernstein. It utilises his work on recontextualisation to identify the nature of teachers’ professional role; and Beck and Young’s (2010) Bernstein-influenced analytical framework to understand changes in these teachers’ professional identity. Drawing on focussed qualitative research the study shows how, within private schools, when cloistered from the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) an idealized account of teachers’ professional work flourishes. This idealized understanding of occupational professionalism is contingent on the ‘othering’ of the state sector: to do this private-school teachers adopt a deprofessionalization discourse which represents the state teacher as a passive receiver of the ORF. In contrast, state teachers foreground their agency to negotiate competing professional logics which they express through hybrid approaches to professional practice.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	0142-5692
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 May 2020
Date of Acceptance:	27 April 2020
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2023 03:02
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/131375

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