ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on my study of thirty teachers of African Caribbean heritage who work as managers in UK schools.1 Like these managers, I have had considerable school teaching experience and have worked as a senior manager in an urban secondary school. I also am of African Caribbean heritage and my research was based on studying people like myself (Zinn 1979). Much of the work that deals with issues of teacher professionalism has been concerned to explore the ways in which competing and conflicting discourses of professionalism have been and continue to be co-opted to manage, regulate and control the teaching force (Ozga 2000). In this chapter I want to explore a different set of questions about the lived experiences of professionals in schools that relate to their ‘choice’ of teaching and their progression in the profession (Daley 2001). In order to understand the professional identities of these teachers, and the racialized nature of their identity construction over the career course, it is critical to read the teachers’ own accounts alongside a consideration of the part played by policy in this process. Teachers’ names have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout.
