ABSTRACT
There are a growing number of discussions and studies which are addressed to the problem of constraints upon teaching. These can be divided, with some admitted degree of injustice, into two main camps. There are those which give stress to a view of constraints as primarily structural phenomena, constituting a field of determinations within which teachers must work and to which they must accommodate their practices (e.g. Sharp and Green, 1976; Hargreaves, 1979; Hunter, 1979). And there are those which, while cognizant of the limitations of social structure, attribute to the teacher a degree of knowledgeability in the skilful construction of strategic responses to constraint (e.g. Lacey, 1977; Woods, 1981). However, neither camp has yet had a great deal to offer in the way of empirical analysis to match their theoretical elaboration. Certainly, there has been little attempt to investigate and plot teachers’ own perceptions of the constraints which they confront in their work. It is with these perceptions that I am concerned here.
