Carola Aili

Qualifying teacher work: everyday work as basis for the autonomy of the teaching profession

Teachers’ work in tuition‐free (non‐classroom) time was investigated to see to what degree teachers do work that could be considered as qualifying for the status of professional autonomy. The question arises in Sweden and elsewhere as both teachers and the state actively, and in tandem, strive to professionalise the work of the teacher. Abbott’s work on the division of expert labour is taken as a point of departure. Based on data collected by an organisation sampling method, the article describes what teachers do in their tuition‐free time. The study data consist of 1166 reports from 59 Swedish teachers’ daily work situations in school years 1–12. Qualifying teacher work is related to teachers’ ways of handling divergent cases, discretionary work and problem solving. Situations where teachers can use specific professional knowledge are described. One of the main findings is that in 22.2% of the situations studied, such professional knowledge can be applied. This corresponds to at least 7.5 hours of the Swedish teachers’ weekly working hours; with the reservation that 10 hours of teachers’ weekly 45 hours working time is not examined. This time corresponds roughly with the non‐regulated working time, that is, time when the teachers do not have to be at school.

Dual learning – a challenge for higher education in the new landscape of governance

In many countries, practice-oriented programmes have been recast as university programmes, fuelling debate on the purpose of higher education. We highlight two ways of talking about the challenges for higher education we think are already familiar to readers. We label them ‘political-worry discourse’ and ‘academic-worry discours’ We argue for a third position that gives due recognition to the turn in governance. Professional work today is performed in a new landscape where maintaining the conditions for autonomy and discretionary work is more important than ever. This has implications for the pedagogic focus of higher education institutions. The proposed ‘dual learning’ concept addresses this challenge through educating students about governance and allowing students to position themselves in relation to the governance of their professions. By discussing governance, we contribute to a previously neglected field and support the position that higher education may indeed be the best place to provide professional education.

Preparing Higher Education Students for the New Landscape of Governance.

Studies have demonstrated that neoliberal governance dismantles professionals’ will to critique, counteracting efforts to improve quality by preventing professionals in all sectors of the labour market from grounding work in their professional convictions. Managing attempts at governance has therefore become an important professional competence. This paper investigates how higher education prepares students for work under neoliberal forms of control. How are they trained to analyse and describe the effects of governance and prepared to work with the standards, manuals and documentation that influence quality in their lines of work? ‘Interruptive focus group conversations’ were performed with students from various professional programmes at a Swedish university. Student reasoning about governance is explored using theories of governance and subjectification. The results demonstrate that students are aware of the ways in which their professions are governed, the need to conduct discretionary work, but do not have skills to deal with governance critically. This latitude for pedagogical intervention is underutilized.