ABSTRACT
The study of the culture and politics of teachers’ work is currently emerging as an important field of social and educational inquiry. ‘The ‘new sociology of education’ that emerged in the 1970s made giant strides with problems like the schools’ relation to the economy and the class bases of educational knowledge but had curiously little to say about teachers. In Britain, one of the most productive approaches, ethnography, has been important in generating essays and accounts of the work of teachers in schools and classrooms. The perspective from which teachers are viewed differs among the writers and the collection includes conflict theory, socio-historical analysis, feminist analysis, diary-based ethnography and interview-based research. Teachers’ leaders in England in the 1950s argued that if greater centralisation of state control over education was to take place, then it would be necessary for teachers to create their own alternative sources of research and policy.
