Adoption and Adaptation - Professionalism in teaching
Sarah Robinson University of Western Australia, Anthropology and Sociology
This paper focuses on how the teachers at a non-government primary school in Perth, Western Australia reconciled the policy requirements from the State and Federal governments for the writing of reports on individual students with their teaching practices. Not only were the policy requirements in conflict with each other but the report writing requirements also contradicted the ethos of the school and the school’s pedagogy. Many researchers (e.g. Ball, 2006) conclude that in reconciling policy requirements with their practices teachers become technicians, loosing their professionalism. However in this study I maintain that the professional agency of the teacher emerges through a process I call ‘adoption and adaptation’ which is made up of number of stages; compliance, negotiation, resistance, fabrication leading to implementation of the policy requirements to a certain extent. The teachers experience a tension, on the one hand between the strategies of accountability and assessment, and on the other the professional agency which they demonstrated through their collegiality, their values, their commitment and beliefs. This resulted in the re-shaping of teachers and their identities as professionals but did not lead to teachers merely becoming technicians.
