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Teachers' Work and the Preparation of Teachers

Writing in the Toronto Star, University of Alberta history professor, Andrew Gow, describes school-teaching as "practically medieval, and certainly preindustrial" in its work rhythms: "A teacher must be ready to perform at a certain time (it's hard to put off a whole class)". He argues that because teachers use their work time differently from most other people, they and their jobs are very easily misunderstood. He also likens school-teaching to university teaching (1998, p. A20). These views from Gow invite speculation on ways to characterize a little more closely, the work that school-teachers do. How might we place teachers' work on continua that would contrast it with other kinds of work? Is teaching different from other work? If so, what are the differences? What implications might there be in all this for teacher preparation. Although Gow's article served his own purposes very well namely by doing something to counter the "many nasty remarks" and "more than one ill-tempered editorial page complaining about teachers' supposedly privileged working conditions" a few things about his argument and his comparisons intrigued me. They provide the impetus for what follows. My article begins by conceptualizing 'work' as a continuum that reaches between the poles of occupational and recreational work. Then I link these categories to two others constrained and unconstrained occupational work arguing that the further workers move from unconstrained to constrained occupational work, the less like recreational workers they become, and the less able they are to see work as an end in itself. Nevertheless, teachers seem an interesting exception to this. Their work is an end in itself, far removed in this way from constrained labour, even though it is surrounded by many constraints which teachers-in-training are not well prepared to meet. This suggests a need for training in ways of dealing expeditiously with the constraints that affect the meaningfulness of the work teachers do. Innovations might include some training in rhetoric, or in the skills of the stenographer and library researcher, or in metacognitive and metalinguistic skills. This article agrees with Gow's conclusion that the unusual work conditions teachers face are little understood by the wider public.