English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Thirty years into teaching: Professional development, exhaustion and rejuvenation
Volume 3 Number 2 September 2004
Barbara Comber (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Barbara Kamler (Deakin University, Australia)
Judy Painter (Christies Beach Learning Centre, South Australia)
Sue Moreau (St John Bosco School, Australia)
Di Hood (Port Augusta West Primary School, Australia)
Female primary school teachers are usually absent
from debates about literacy theory and practice, teachers’ professional
development, significant policy changes and school reform. Typically
they are positioned as the silent workers who passively translate the
latest and of course best theory into practice, whatever that might be
and despite what years of experience might tell them. Their accumulated
knowledges and critical analysis, developed across careers, remain an
untapped resource for the profession. In this paper five literacy
educators, three primary school teachers and two university educators,
all of whom have been teaching around thirty years, reflect on what
constitutes professional development. The teachers examine their
experiences of professional development in their particular school
contexts – the problems with top-down, mandated professional
development which has a managerial rather than educative function, the
frustrations of trying to implement the experts’ ideas without the
resources, and the effects of devolved school management on teachers’
work and learning. In contrast, they also explore their positive
experiences of professional learning through being positioned as
teacher researchers in a network of early and later career teachers
engaged in a three-year research project investigating unequal literacy
outcomes.