Storytelling
We learn important things through stories. Our wisdom and experiential knowing is embedded in the stories we tell about ourselves. Stories invest our lives with meaning, they develop and express our creativity. We organize information in story form. It is how we make sense of the world around us and it is how we communicate that understanding to one another. We want to encourage storytelling about the central themes that the conference is intending to address, namely how participants have come to understand what being professional means.
Personal stories about being professional
Prior to the conferences we would like you to tell a story about an incident or event in your life through which you gained important insights into the meaning of being professional. Through this process we hope to connect people and their lives and reveal some important propositional knowledge about being professional which is embedded in our personal knowledge. Russ Law (SCEPTrE) will be compiling and synthesising the stories and we will make them available through the wiki.
Analysis of stories
Jenny Willis & Russ Law
Please add your own story
Russ's story
Context
When I started teaching, I had the tacit view that professionalism meant, simply, being paid for doing something in a really expert way. The dimensions and range of the expertise were not questions that I asked myself at the time. My first position was in a Middle School, where I was to teach a range of subjects and have responsibility for a class. My training (Postgraduate Cert Ed) had, however, been in general education and modern languages.
What happened?
The school was a particularly quirky and innovative one in the sense that it aimed at a child-centred education with no prescribed texts or written curriculum guidance. How I got the job remains a mystery. There was no staff handbook or formal induction process. I struggled to make sense of my new environment. I wanted to do a good job, but lacked the detailed knowledge or support that would have helped. Every day I seemed to contravene some principle of the school’s, for example the rule about the students having different shoes for indoors and outdoors, or the proscription of spelling practice. I felt like an ignorant newcomer at an exclusive golf club. The production of teaching materials from scratch was hard, too.
What I learned
As the year went on, and thanks to considerable help from my wife who was also a teacher, many hours of anxious planning and preparation, and a great deal of trial and especially error, things began to make more sense for me and for the students. They were willing and entertaining and we established a constructive rapport that sustained morale generally.
I still look back on that learning experience with a mixture of affection and resentment. It is clear to me now that being professional means not only having a set of attitudes and training, but also:
· in-depth knowledge of a particular field
· constructive reflection on experience and the effects of my practice
· rigorous induction and monitoring procedures
· the earnest desire to ‘get it right’
· being a member of a strong, disciplined, expert community
Lessons for educators
The implications for educators include, I think, that attention must be given to focused knowledge-acquisition, demystification of practice, reflection, the identification and nurturing of personal will, the development of skills conducive to community membership, and ongoing learning on the job (especially at the outset). This requires a combination of attributes for both learning and being.
An afterthought that occurs to me is that the very word ‘professional’ is one for which the meaning is contested by powerful and incompatible forces. Given the prevalence and general acceptance of cheating and the use of illegal and unethical practices by experts in the fields of professional banking, politics and sport, who is genuinely entitled to the description ‘professional’?
Learning to be professional from life-wide experiences – more examples