The Occupational Culture of Teachers and Its Transformation

YAMADA Tetsuya, HASEGAWA Yutaka

doi:10.11151/eds.86.39

Policies on teachers in recent years, introduced against the background of distrust toward schools, have developed in the direction of promoting: (a) changes in the authority of teachers and (b) changes in working groups of teachers. This paper attempts to grasp the current situation of teachersʼ professional identities and their occupational culture amidst the transformation in their world together with (a) and (b), through an analysis of data from questionnaire surveys which were conducted by a survey group including the authors of this paper from the viewpoint of the theory of occupational culture of teachers. The following three points are clarified by the analysis. First, through an international comparison of data of teachersʼ investigations (2004-5), it was clarified that in all countries where the investigation was conducted, teachersʼ professional identities were composed of two aspects: “stable professional identity” and “disturbed professional identity.” The former resulted from teachersʼ sense that they could deal with their work and found it fulfilling and successful, and the latter consisted of a sense of doubt regarding the effectiveness of their own work, which was caused by difficulties involved in teaching that seemed insurmountable to teachers. Second, a distinct feature of Japanese teachers was that they were found to maintain their professional identities through a “dualising strategy,” which helped them to regard various matters related to the two above-mentioned aspects of teachersʼ professional identities as being relatively separate, and to see the difficulties that they confronted as issues that they could not manage, and by doing so prevented them from experiencing the disquiet of a “stable” aspect of professional identity. Thirdly, through a time-series comparison of data from teachersʼ investigations executed at two different times (1991 and 2004-5) within Japan, it was suggested that the above-mentioned transformation of the world of teachers took place alongside the decline of the existing occupational culture of teachers, whose most important components were “the image of the devoted teacher” and “the unifying relational structure” of teachers, and which had contributed to the maintenance of teachersʼ professional identities. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that there is a need to open the school to that outside the teachersʼ world in order to prevent it increasing individualization, insulation, and directionality towards confirmation of the status quo among teacher, and that to do so, current policies toward teachers based on the premise of a distrust of teachers should be reconsidered.

The Occupational Culture of Teachers and Its Transformation

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