ABSTRACT
What constitutes professionalism in FE is an elusive concept. Although professional work in FE has been subjected to a plethora of initiatives in recent years, little is known about its practitioners, their dispositions and how they define their sense of professionalism in the changing context of their work. In Chapter 6, however, we saw how tutors have a direct impact on teaching and learning, there are other changes that tutors make that are more to do with mitigating the effects of changes imposed from elsewhere – outside the particular learning site, or outside the college. We also saw why it is that improvement is far from being a simple matter of finding what works and implementing it. Learning cultures are complex, and always partly beyond the reach of the participants in any particular situation, and improvement always entails judgements about what is educationally desirable. If genuine change for the better involves changing the learning culture, then we need to pay some attention to the scope for practitioners in FE to define what is educationally desirable. We are not implying that their judgements will always be the best ones: rather, that it is important to acknowledge the ways in which practitioners engage with the other elements of the learning culture. Accordingly, this chapter gives brief attention to how people become practitioners in FE and the importance of ideas of flexibility. It then looks at professional dispositions and practices, illustrating how challenges to practitioners’ judgements are played out, and argues that ‘mediation’, together with ‘field’ and ‘habitus’, are concepts that offer a more subtle grasp of what happens than ‘compliance/non-compliance’. We give a brief account of how the TLC project has taken forward its
analysis of professionality and conclude that, contrary to managerialist tendencies, professionality has to be understood as a fundamental feature of a learning culture, and it is therefore also fundamental to the improvement of teaching and learning in the context of what Foster (2005: 33) refers to as ‘the new discourse’ of FE.
