More on ‘professionals’ and ‘professionalism’

Boston Legal: lawyers in pants

Originally uploaded by LordKhan

The tutor groups are abuzz with discussion about what exactly is a ‘professional’ and indeed an ‘elearning professional’. Our tutor doesn’t let things lie, and reckoned that if we as burgeoning elearning professionals don’t see ourselves on a par with more traditional professions, is this not a problem. Here’s my 2c.

From looking at various contributors’ reponses across many tutor groups, it seems difficult not to include remuneration in definitions of professional (as opposed to ‘professionalism’). If we look at the established professions such as law and medicine, and we seek to place elearning on the same plane, it doesn’t seem to work.

What’s the difference?

1) Gatekeeping: the traditional professions don’t make it easy to get in. Apart from the qualifications, being published, experience (so far, the same as ourselves), there are also quite protracted periods of study, formal networking/ritual (a friend of mine who is becoming a barrister in Ireland must attend a number of dinners and speak to ’superiors’ using quite antiquated terms), and indeed costumes. It’s difficult to get into these professions (I wonder how many doctors there are with non-acquired disabilities?). Elearning is rather easier to get into (indeed many seem to have found themselves in it somewhat accidentally!)

2) Remuneration. The traditional professions are generally very well paid. If we look at some of the characteristics of a professional as collected by Warrior, we might have to stretch them in order to includes athletes, some of whom are described as being professionals. Certainly a professional boxer also pays his/her dues, spends time improving his/her abilities and may even be involved in progressing the sport, but when we talk about sports people being professionals, it’s usually about the money. Sadly, elearning professionals (in line with others in education) generally cannot command as much as our friends in law and medicine do.

Of course we could go to the free market and sell our knowledge there, but if we make some money out there is it not down to our business acumen rather than our elearning skills?

6.1 Thoughts on Warrior

Warrior argues that ‘professionalism [in teaching] is synonymous with quality and the current practices relating to maintaining and monitoring standards are issues of contentious debate’. While I found her round up of the definitions of professionalism illuminating, I was particularly interested in the ‘contentious debate’ connected with the attempts to raise teaching to professional level by applying standards but how this trend may adversely affect practitioners.

Professionalism can be defined as being ‘not amateur’ (Lindrop 1982). In that sense, it involves being paid, often highly paid, and making a career out of pursuing an activity. It involves pursuing a career, one that has distinguishing characteristics and ‘an element of intellectual training’. Warrior lists two sets of characteristics of professionals, from 1964 and 1982. Both make reference to having a responsibility to serving the public either through having codes of conduct or ‘minimum standards’.

Interestingly, the later definition lists the professional’s claim to ‘exercising personal judgement’. When she examines the teaching profession, she notes that this characteristic is significantly lessened by the impact of external and rigidly enforced standards of quality. These ‘bureaucratic rules and managerial controls’ can be ‘intrusive’ and may result in ‘a severe loss in professional autonomy’. Sometimes this can result in teachers suffering from stress and seeking help for depressive disorders in disproportionate numbers.

Two years ago, I got a new colleague who set about restructuring our department. To my mind, she injected some badly needed systems, procedures and record-keeping which had the result of my feeling more professional and competent. With her backing, I sought and got a regrading of my post with the resultant (dramatic!) increase in salary. The trade off was an enormous increase in bureaucracy and occasional delays in service provision as a result of ensuring the paperwork is in order. I have sometimes decided to turn a blind eye to the threat of an external audit in order to ensure that a student receives urgently-needed support.

All of which suggests that a certain baseline of accountability is required in order to establish standards that can be adhered to and compared. After all, quality does not exist in a vacuum; it is only meaningful as a concept when two or more things are examined using the same criteria.But this need not be restrictive. Once the baseline is reached, they must be room for discretion and rule-bending.

And indeed, both she and I have formally chosen to break the ‘rules’ imposed on us from government agencies. We were upfront about our rationale and unapologetic about our decision. Far from being reprimanded, the new path that we beat was formally incorporated by the government agency the following year. This suggests that, while standards are imposed from without, the expertise of the professional is always within.

Perkin’s Professional Society

Professional society has enormous potential for enhancing human life and ensuring social justice, but it also presents the professional elites with egregious opportunities for exploitation.

In this introductory chapter to Perkin’s The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World, the author outlines how he will demonstrate how the modern world belongs to the professional. The professional possesses specialised knowledge based on education, competitive merit and experience in the field. He (more likely than she) dominates society because he controls ‘the scarce resource of expertise in its manifold forms’.

The opening pages appear to belong to one of those unlikely bestsellers with a Big Idea which illustrated by myriad examples of the negative effects of contemporary life often tracing the historical/ideological roots of the malaise. The language of these books (e.g. No Logo, Fast Food Nation) is frequently foreboding, occasionally shrill, but often these stylistic devices can be overlooked as the message and premise appears sound.

In this case, I’m not so sure.

Perkin starts his chapter in a quite dramatic way (capture the reader), but his tone becomes more reasonable and less hyperbolic as the chapter progresses. The results of the Neolithic Revolution, he claims, had brought wealth and power to the few, but a regression for the many. These unfortunates had been yanked from a ‘casual, carefree, improvident life of hunting and gathering in humanity’s Eden’, it seems. Or had they been rescued from short, painful, barbaric existences that offered no opportunity to progress beyond instinctual survival?

Perkin talks about the ’seductive revolution of the professionals’, how professionals have emerged as the leaders rather than servants in the current order. He looks at seven countries which he says illustrate ten characteristics of professional society. One of these trends is the ‘centrality’ of higher education. The numbers of young people in higher education has doubled or trebled between 1960 and 1988. This, on the surface, would appear to be something worth cheering about.

Far from it, as he argues that a professional society needs to invest heavily in education in order to feed the corporate/service/political machine. In this sense, I question my own motives in enrolling in a module called ‘The eLearning Professional‘. Not only am I angling to ‘command a rent as surely as the landlord or owner of industrial capital’, but I’m involved in facilitating students in becoming the next generation of the privileged. As you can imagine, I feel a little conflicted.

Interestingly, he cannot deny what perhaps those of us idealists involved in education feel; that education is an empowering currency which makes it more difficult for regimes to deceive for very long. He cites the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites as an example of how an educated population would no longer swallow the propaganda being fed to them.So he ends the chapter in an altogether more measured way with the line that opens my thoughts here.

Would I be persuaded of the ambiguity of my pursuit of professionalism were I to read on? I don’t know. I’m unlikely to delve more deeply into it. When I struggled though No Logo and The Long Tail, I tried to make sense of the statistics and economic jargon because I knew who the bad guys were.

With Perkin, I seem to be the bad guy. And things don’t usually end so well for them.