ABSTRACT
The struggle of teachers for professional recognition and for the associated working conditions and rewards that might bring it about has a long and chequered history. More pay, higher status, greater autonomy, increased self-regulation and improved standards of training-these recurrent themes have underscored the individual and collective struggles of teachers for many decades. Yet, notwithstanding a few historical and geographical exceptions such as the substantial salaries achieved by Canadian teachers in the 1970s, the high degree of autonomy over curriculum development and decision-making enjoyed by British teachers in the 1960s and early 1970s (Grace, 1987) and the conversion of teaching to an all-graduate profession during the same period almost everywhere, the project of professionalization has been steadfastly resisted by cost-conscious, and control-centred governments and bureaucracies. Collectively and individually, teachers themselves have also often seemed ambivalent about whether their identity is that of professionals or cultural workers. They have therefore been uncertain and inconsistent about whether they should pursue middle class status in ‘acceptable professional’ ways, or use the collective strategies of union bargaining to defend their interests (Ginsburg et al., 1980; Carlson, 1992; Bascia, 1994).
