ABSTRACT
Professionalism is a highly specific and contextualized idea which is used in contemporary educational writing as a commonsense way of describing or explaining the work of the English teacher. Indeed the teacher and professionalism are so closely bound together in descriptions of work, careers and governance that it seems impolite to raise questions about the meaning of professionalism as to do so risks impugning English teachers. Professionalism is such an affirmative word, with many good associations, that it appears to be beyond critique. Researchers may begin with a short foray into its meanings but then lose their bearings and treat it as a descriptive term in the research. Its very embeddedness in the language of education is remarkable when it is recognized that it is so closely associated with the modernizing tendency in English education and was rooted in a quite specific sociopolitical and education context. Partly a response to exigency and partly a sophisticated attempt to manage teachers, the language of professionalism, responsibility and autonomy was generated to explain why English teachers were different to those elsewhere and why they didn’t need to be involved with the politics of education (and later society). Only in retrospect, from the vantage point of the 1990s where progress in education has been so damaged by spurious reforms and the teachers’ professional claims to education dismantled by the sidelining of their associations is it possible to ascertain the shape and purpose of professionalism as a controlling and yet useful myth.
