ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a two-year ethnographic study of a teacher education program in one university. Pre-service teachers are shown to draw upon education, remuneration, power, and individual attitude/behavior themes of the ideology of professionalism both in making claims about whether teaching is a profession and in indicating their perception of the legitimacy of unequal social relations characteristic of societies in which capitalist and patriarchal societies dominate. It is argued that such ideologically informed conceptions of professionalism can function either to mask and thus mediate or illuminate and thus provide the basis for intervening in contradictions associated with unequal class and gender relations.
