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Abstract(s)
Professional culture refers to how teachers carry out their work in teaching institutions. Through this, the work carried out takes on meaning and new teachers learn to solve their problems, being gradually integrated in the professional community. Teachers’ professional culture includes the beliefs, habits and ways of acting that are shared within a particular group of teachers or in the teaching community they are part of, and this can be observed in relationships between teachers. In turn, teacher professionality is understood as what is specific in the teaching action, i.e., the set of behaviours, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values forming the specificity of being a teacher. Professional culture and teacher professionality have gained visibility in recent research, above all with regard to higher education, due to the growth and increasing complexity of this sub-section of teaching in current society.
Higher education has undergone major transformation with the introduction of ‘new management’ as a general set of ideological principles with an emphasis on accountability, i.e., providing accounts based on strategic planning, performance indicators, quality auditing, and assessment of research and teaching, which has changed and continues to change the activities of Higher Education Institutions (HEI). The institutional emphasis on results has come to be part of professional culture, presenting teachers with significant challenges, particularly the conciliation of more student-centred teaching with knowledge production, through research and publication, besides performing management and extension functions. The balance, or lack of it, between these various dimensions, or how higher education teachers view professionalism and construct their professionality, seems to be related to the professional culture of the Higher Education Institutions (HEI) they belong to, and as a result of the meanings each HEI creates, through rituals, routines, beliefs or ethics, with repercussions on how teachers carry out their activity, on their relations with each other and the practices they use. In this text, we seek to explore the existing relationships between professional culture and teacher professionality in higher education, resorting to a review of the relevant literature. The literature analysed suggests that how teachers face the different functions they have to perform, and the balance between them, is affected by the perspectives and orientations of their colleagues, in particular groups or in the teaching community. Among these perspectives, scholarship for teaching stands out as a means to develop the teaching profession, whereas that of publish or perish can jeopardize it.
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Keywords
Professional culture; Teacher professionality Higher education New management
Citation
Publisher
Edulearn