Publication details
Zur Deutung des Lehrberufs durch Lehrer und Lehrerinnen. Eine Geschichte berufsbezogener Deutungsmuster. Projektskizze
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The scope of this project will be about how teachers perceived their professional role and the role of their profession in society and how these patterns of perception changed in a historical perspective. The project would take up main insights from my dissertation. There, I examined the debate on rural school-reform in Austria (approx. 1920-1965) from a teachers’ perspective. My inquiry showed that there was another topic playing a significant role in the debate, apart from a concrete reform agenda: the teachers’ professional role, their professional tasks and their position in society. One important idea in this context was that school would be able to shape the future of society, preventing undesirable tendencies in society and culture and facilitating desirable ones. Therefore, teachers imagined that their own role in society would be of great significance. Those constructs were an important source for their engagement in school-reform and for their professional engagement as a whole. In my new project, I want to examine how such self-perceptions relating to the professional role and social significance of teachers changed over time in a more general perspective. Which guises of this idea can be discerned? What else were crucial aspects of teachers’ professional self-perceptions? How did the ideas about the teachers’ power to shape the future relate to other aspects of their professional self-perception? How did these ideas change and how where these changes related to changes of the social position of teachers on the one hand and to changes of societal discourses (outside the field of pedagogy) on the other hand? And how did such ideational concepts interact with concrete attitudes pertaining to their professional tasks? The period I want to examine would span from the establishment of state schooling in the 19th (resp. late 18th) century up to the present. The methodical framework would lean on sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie). I plan to consider multiple sorts of sources, among which teachers’ journals and autobiographical material would play an important role. As far as I see now the outcome of this inquiry might reveal a kind of dilemma: Teachers regularly were deceived when they believed that their professional engagement was a straight remedy for social ills or would directly lead to the kind of future they longed for. However, this idea was an important resource for their professional engagement enabling them to find sense in their professional role even under adverse circumstances. |
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