Opposing views on teacher professionalism: institutionalist versus fiduciary, authorial professionalism
Date
2025
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation critically examines the concept of responsibility within competing models of teacher professionalism: institutionalist professionalism and authorial professionalism. Drawing from a case study with ethnographic elements, it explores how institutionalism mandates structure teacher accountability in ways that constrain professional autonomy, contrasting this with a model in which teachers are responsible for their students’ educational journeys as unique dynamic and authorial processes. Using captured dialogue as research art, this study documents the lived experiences of a high school social studies teacher, Pete, who has a complex and sometimes conflicting relationship with his institutionalist administrators. Pete’s authorial professionalism challenges institutionalist expectations that prioritize compliance with an ideology for preset teaching practices over his authorial style that is responsive to his students’ emerging interests and desires. The research situates this tension within broader philosophical and sociological discussions about the notion of “professionalism” and its relationship to the moral concern of responsibility. Engaging with the works of Bakhtin, Weber, Arendt, Flexner, Kant, Goffman, Matusov, and others, it argues that institutionalist professionalism, rooted in bureaucratic rationalization and performative accountability, externalizes responsibility, reducing the teacher to a mere implementer of standardized practices. In contrast, authorial professionalism demands an ethical and intellectual responsibility, where the teacher, as an autonomous professional, is central to the pedagogical decisions in the contexts in which they are implemented. Through qualitative analysis of state code and other official rhetoric, a teacher evaluation and educator discourse, this study investigates how institutional structures shape and constrain professional practice, ultimately advocating for a reconceptualization of teacher responsibility that foregrounds professional authorship, moral agency, and the unpredictability of genuine responsibility in education.
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Keywords
Accountability, Arendt, Bakhtin, Bureaucracy, Responsibility, School administration