Table Of ContentExploring Relational Professionalism in Schools
STUDIES IN PROFESSIONAL LIFE AND WORK
Author(s)
Anneli Frelin
University of Gävle, Sweden
Editorial Board
J. M. Pancheco, University of Minho, Portugal
David Labaree, Stanford University
Sverker Lindblad, University of Gothenburg
Leslie Siskin, NYU/Steinhardt Institute for Education & Social Policy
Scope
The series will commission books in the broad area of professional life and work. This is a
burgeoning area of study now in educational research with more and more books coming out
on teachers’ lives and work, on nurses’ life and work, and on the whole interface between
professional knowledge and professional lives.
The focus on life and work has been growing rapidly in the last two decades. There are a
number of rationales for this. Firstly, there is a methodological impulse: many new studies
are adopting a life history approach. The life history tradition aims to understand the interface
between people’s life and work and to explore the historical context and the socio-political
circumstances in which people’s professional life and work is located. The growth in life history
studies demands a series of books which allow people to explore this methodological focus
within the context of professional settings.
The second rationale for growth in this area is a huge range of restructuring initiatives
taking place throughout the world. There is in fact a world movement to restructure education
and health. In most forms this takes the introduction of more targets, tests and tables and
increasing accountability and performativity regimes. These initiatives have been introduced
at governmental level – in most cases without detailed consultation with the teaching and
nursing workforces. As a result there is growing evidence of a clash between people’s
professional life and work missions and the restructuring initiatives which aim to transform
these missions. One way of exploring this increasingly acute clash of values is through studies
of professional life and work. Hence the European Commission, for instance, have begun to
commission quite large studies of professional life and work focussing on teachers and nurses.
One of these projects – the Professional Knowledge Network project has studied teachers’
and nurses’ life and work in seven countries. There will be a range of books coming out from
this project and it is intended to commission the main books on nurses and on teachers for
this series.
The series will begin with a number of works which aim to define and delineate the field
of professional life and work. One of the first books ‘Investigating the Teacher’s Life and
Work’ by Ivor Goodson will attempt to bring together the methodological and substantive
approaches in one book. This is something of a ‘how to do’ book in that it looks at how such
studies can be undertaken as well as what kind of generic findings might be anticipated.
Future books in the series might expect to look at either the methodological approach of
studying professional life and work or provide substantive findings from research projects
which aim to investigate professional life and work particularly in education and health
settings.
Exploring Relational Professionalism in Schools
Anneli Frelin
University of Gävle, Sweden
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6209-246-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-247-1 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-248-8 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/
Printed on acid-free paper
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Teacher Professionality 5
2. A Relational Approach 15
3. The Exploration 29
4. Teachers’ Relational Practices I 41
5. Adding Analytical Layers I: Negotiating teacher-student
educational relationships 57
6. Teachers’ Relational Practices II 67
7. Adding Analytical Layers II: Negotiating educational
communities among students 89
8. Teachers’ Practice and Relational Complexities 105
9. Relational Professionalism in Schools 119
References 129
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The explorations of this book are deeply rooted in a relational perspective. This has
a multitude of meanings. For one, it means that the relationships that were built and
sustained throughout the entire journey are essential for the outcome. For all of these
I am truly thankful. I would like to extend my gratitude to the following people: The
eleven teachers from preschool to upper secondary school, who generously shared
their precious time, stories and knowing. Everyone involved in the process of my
doctoral studies at the University of Uppsala, the University of Gävle and other
places in Sweden and abroad, who have enriched my enquiries and my life. Among
these, I would particularly like to mention my colleagues, Silvia Edling and Jan
Grannäs, for their valuable partnerships in research. I am grateful to Professor Ivor
Goodson and Sense Publishers for the opportunity to publish my work. I would also
like to thank my language editors, Alan Andersson and Sue Glover Frykman, who
have done a wonderful job of editing different parts of the text. Any problematic
wording is entirely my own responsibility. Lastly, I am grateful for my family
relationships that keep me rooted but still make me grow.
vii
INTRODUCTION
Thinking Relationally Regarding Teacher Professionality
While teacher professionality obviously involves knowing one’s content matter and
the ways in which that content matter can be learned, it also involves managing the
classroom. My background as a school teacher has given me experience of all of
these aspects of teacher knowledge. Although I view them as inevitably intertwined,
my main interest lies in the latter of these three – managing classrooms, which in
my terms really means managing relationships with students and between students.
My interest was furthered by the experience that this aspect has been the most
challenging and difficult one, and I share this experience with new and experienced
teachers, as indicated by research (e.g. Klaassen, 2002; McNally, Blake, Corbin, &
Gray, 2008; Veenman, 1984; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). With many
teachers I share the experience of having navigated some serious ”swampy lowlands
of practice”.1 I know what a classroom smells like the day after graduation, I have
listened to the snuffles of students travelling around the classroom in late November,
and I have seen the light in a student’s eyes when s/he suddenly connects the dots.
During my years spent in the classroom I worked closely with several colleagues,
some of whom were especially good at handling relationships and were appreciated
very much by their students. I started to think of them as “sensitive teachers”.2
From our discussions I understood that they established certain relationships to
their students for various reasons, some of which were tied to mainly practical
considerations, and others of which were tied to what might be regarded as wider
human concerns. My observation was that the approach adopted by some teachers
towards their students was deeply intertwined with their sense of professionality, but
that they weighed this more human concern against other circumstances, in complex
deliberation.
Working as a teacher throughout the 1990s, a decade characterized by spending
cuts in all public spheres, my experience was that it became more difficult to
accommodate the human concern for students as classes grew larger and time for
individual attention shrank. It appeared as if certain political decisions had been
made without enough consideration for the realities of teacher practice and school
environment. Teachers’ arguments as to why teaching groups of thirty students
rather than twenty made a difference remained unheard. But in terms of a simple
thing like getting twenty or thirty students in and out of a classroom it makes a
tangible physical difference. Moreover and more importantly, the time that teachers
can spend with each student is reduced, and in terms of managing relationships, the
relational complexity more than doubles.3 As teacher time spent with students has
proven to be especially valuable for the results of unprivileged students (see e.g.
Andersson, 2007; Molnar et al., 1999), attending to class size is also a question of
social justice.
1
INTRODUCTION
Focusing on the Relational Dimension of Teaching
It is common knowledge that some teachers succeed more than others in building
relationships with their students that are positive in terms of educational ends. Here
I will argue that a teacher’s ability to create and sustain good relationships with and
among students is not merely an inherent quality, or something that concerns the
particulars of her or his personality, but is a dimension of teacher professionality.
Although the relational dimension of teaching is a central feature of the teaching
process it goes beyond the teacher’s knowledge of her or his students. In this book
I place teachers’ relational work with students at center stage, considering it as
something important that parallels or is done in the shadow of direct instruction. I
argue that such practice is guided by a relational professionality that is both important
and underemphasized.
The attempt herein will be to single out the relational dimension of teaching, as
expressed through relational practice, and to analyze it in terms of three aspects
that highlight the complex relational conditions under which education occurs. It is
here important to note that the singling out of the relational dimension is largely for
purposes of analysis; in the reality of the teaching situation all dimensions of teacher
professionality are usually conflated, and thus difficult to discern. Moreover, a given
teacher’s relational professionality is here not conceived as a pre-package ability
that can be called forth and applied in each and every instance. Rather, it is viewed
as action in pursuit of relational ends that are beneficial for educational purposes. As
such, the meaning of these ends and the degree of professionality of a given action
cannot be entirely determined prior to the act itself; this is one of the circumstances
that ties relational professionality to its context.
Teachers and students are always in some form of relation. However, not all such
relations are necessarily beneficial for educational purposes. The relational conditions
that schools provide carry important implications in terms of what students learn.
Because of this relational conditions are an integral part of a teacher’s responsibility
and practice. Here, teachers’ intentional work on their relationships with and among
their students is treated as a practice in its own right – i.e., relational practice.
In sum: Teachers’ relational practices consist of actions with the (sometimes single)
purpose of creating, maintaining and/or enhancing relationships that are beneficial
for education, or aimed at preventing the opposite: relationships that impede or
obstruct students’ educational possibilities. As such, actions in pursuit of relational
ends are not divorced from those in pursuit of other educational ends; indeed, all
such ends are often concurrently pursued. When focusing on relationships, and
specifically on the teacher’s work of developing relationships with and between
students, other features of practice are left in the periphery, including those that
are involved in the development of other types of relations that are also part of a
teacher’s work – e.g., with parents, colleagues and administrators.
2
