Investigating the life and work of teachers

Abstract

Relative importance of work has exponentially grown in teachers’ lives in the last 40 years. Moves to restructure schooling and education have increased and so have studies on the impact of these changes. This work allows us to concentrate on some of the complexities at the heart of many new school reform initiatives. Writing in 1975, at the end of a ‘golden age’ for Western society, Lortie summarized the relationship between teachers and educational research in the US in words that still stand up well today: "Schooling is long on prescription, short on description. That is nowhere more evident than in the case of the two million persons who teach in the public schools." The point that Lortie makes has continued to be in force in the research discourse as related to teachers – a good deal of prescription and implicit portrayal but very little serious study of, or collaboration with, those portrayed.