Teachers as Professionals: How Contextual Knowledge Justifies Teacher Autonomy

Background: Despite claims made by teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, the dominant U.S. legal and political practice holds that teachers are not full professionals. Denying teachers’ full professional status limits teachers’ professional autonomy and leaves their work heavily controlled by external authorities. Are these external limits on teachers’ work justified? Definitions of what a full profession is vary, but nearly all require the professional to possess complex and specialized knowledge, which justifies the self-regulation of the field by its practitioners. Unlike the knowledge possessed by doctors and lawyers, the knowledge teachers possess is often thought to be insufficiently specialized and complex to meet this standard—they are claimed at best to be “semi-professionals.” Purpose: This essay aims to show that leading arguments used to reject teachers’ claim to professional status rely on a misleadingly decontextualized picture of pedagogical knowledge traceable to Lee Shulman. Against this picture, I follow Gloria Ladson-Billings’s critique of Shulman from the perspective of culturally relevant pedagogy to advance what I refer to as the integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge. The integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge reveals that although teachers possess a unique and highly complex knowledge base, that knowledge base is always in large part hyper-context-specific. Once the hyper-context-specificity of teachers’ knowledge is appreciated, we discover that teachers’ claim to professional status is justified, contrary to prevailing legal and political practice. Research Design: This essay uses empirically engaged philosophical methods to analyze the existing arguments against teachers’ claim to full professional status. By making the presuppositions and limitations of these arguments explicit, the analysis supports a revision in theory, policy, and practice toward the integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and teaching’s professional status. Recommendations: The integrated account of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge recommends the development of professional institutions for teaching. Because pedagogical knowledge differs in its hyper-context-specificity from the more codifiable knowledge bases of other professions, the professional institutions and practices appropriate to teaching differ as well. To guide policy, research, and practice, I trace four commitments implied by the integrated account of pedagogical knowledge: (1) representation from learner communities in professional pathways; (2) professional organizations and standards rooted in hyper-context-specific knowledge; (3) culturally sustaining, teacher-driven law and policy creation processes; and (4) educational research that centers teachers’ professional wisdom.