What does 'professionalism' mean for teachers and trainers in further education colleges or adult education centres? Over the last twenty years, ideas about professionalism and professional identity within the post-compulsory sector have been shaped and reshaped by successive policies, standards, and professional bodies. Yet, these ideas themselves remain controversial and continue to be the focus of debate as well as research.
This book gathers together a series of articles published over the last ten years, providing critical and research-based perspectives on professionalism within post-compulsory education and training. The twelve chapters that are presented here explore issues such as professional standards and continuing professional development and their impact on current definitions and frameworks of professionalism, as well as the policies that have shaped these processes. These are issues that are of relevance and importance not only to practitioners and researchers in the post-compulsory sector, but to anyone who is concerned with contemporary debates about what it means to be 'a professional' in education and training. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Research in Post-Compulsory Education.
Introduction Part I: Professionalism - standards and policies 1. Performativity and professional development: the gap between policy and practice in the English further education sector 2. One step forward, two steps back? The professionalisation of further education teachers in England 3. Professional versus occupational models of work competence 4. Professionalism in vocational education: international perspectives Part II: Professional Identities 5. 'Square peg - round hole': the emerging professional identities of HE in FE lecturers working in a partner college network in south-west England 6. Professionalism, identity and the self: the de-moralisation of teachers in English sixth form colleges 7. The state of professional practice and policy in the English further education system: a view from below 8. The impact of lecturers' initial teacher training on continuing professional development needs for teaching and learning in post-compulsory education Part III: Constructions of Professionalism 9. 'Nothing will prevent me from doing a good job'. The professionalisation of part-time teaching staff in further and adult education 10. Expansive and restrictive approaches to professionalism in FE colleges: the observation of teaching and learning as a case in point 11. Professionalism: doing a good job! 12. Locating post-16 professionalism: public spaces as dissenting spaces
