ABSTRACT
Much work in the sociology of education in the last few years has been characterized by an interest in the various ways in which different facets of social structure constrain educational affairs. Thus, for example, social relations in school, the ideologies of both the official and the hidden curriculum, the very definitions of ‘educating’, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ have all been variously portrayed as fundamentally shaped and controlled by social forces located at a higher structural level than that of the institution. However, one criticism this work has attracted is that the extent to which schooling is either a relatively autonomous or a relatively determined domain is an empirical question yet to be properly addressed or substantiated. The great difficulty for those wishing to make such demonstration is, of course, the problem of showing precisely where and how structural properties penetrate institutional and individual educational lives. It is not surprising that teachers and their activities have become of crucial interest to those seeking to establish such a form of analysis and, indeed, much recent work in the discipline has been directed toward charting different aspects of the constraints which seem to act upon teachers as they accomplish their everyday interactions. Teachers, as we noted in the preface, can be represented as crucial mediators of structural forces and attention to how their activities might be explained through reference to pressures originating in, say, ideological or political formations has obvious attractions. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that we know very little about the forms particular constraining influences take, the impact such influences have upon lived experience and, critically, the way these constraints are perceived, interpreted and acted upon by teachers themselves. This last point is important if we are to avoid portraying the influence of structural forces upon educational affairs in a crude and over-deterministic fashion – or using what Olson calls ‘an imprinting model’ of this penetration. Exploration and illustration of ways in which we might avoid this pit-fall by deliberately striving to explore the reaction and responses of teachers to external constraints identified by either sociologists or themselves is the common thread which runs through the various papers in this section.
