Recently, the IEU was invited to take part in an event organized by ACDE – the Australian Council of Deans of Education. As I understand it, this is a peak body made up of Heads of Schools and their equivalents from tertiary education providers. THe purpose of the event was ’Collaborating to Improve the Status of the Teaching Profession.’
I should clarify what I mean by invited: I heard about it from our federal secretary, who suggested someone might be interested in going. The event itself appeared to hold some similarities with another event that the IEU had organized in Melbourne last year – that is, of bringing together stakeholders in education in order to develop and build power. Unfortunately, when I made some enquirers of ACDE, we were advised that they had failed to invite any of the teaching unions. Under pressure, they invited the AEU, and then, again after further enquirers they invited the IEU and asked me to be part of a panel.
Of course, I was more than willing to be part of the panel. As we’ve all heard before, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, and that was a phrase that seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite the emphasis on improving the status of the profession, it appeared that more and more of the invited guests were only interested in criticizing the teaching profession – or promoting their own agenda. This was evident in the politicians – Dan Tehran provided a rambling digression about who knows what, while Janet Rice criticized private schools and their teachers. Andrew Giles’ big plan was a bursary for teacher education students. So far, so uninspiring. THis was followed by a session from a couple of journalists, who both emphasized their desire to be pitched to about good news stories and how teachers really needed to do more in this respect. This was followed by two other sessions- one of young, talented and either brand new or about to be brand new teachers who told us everything that is currently wrong with education (and teachers) and how they’re going to be the ones that fix it – and other session which felt like a Gruen episode – in that, really, all we needed was a reality TV show and a bit of brand management.
By the time my session arrived, I was a little confused – and more than a little depressed. The part that really bothered me – and I think I made this very clear during my 3 minute bit – was that, despite all this talk, there had been very little discussion by teachers. Where were the panels full of teachers talking about the challenges to their status? I also made the point that we should really be talking about power – status is a bit of a non-word – and realistically, you can’t have this conversation without acknowledging the very actors who are trying to limit the power of teachers – in fact, those groups who have built economic models on exactly that.
I straddle two worlds – both academia and teaching (and unionism, too, I guess) – so I know very well the way that some parts of academia – including ITE – look down upon teachers. I think that was present in some respects at this event in the way that people felt they could talk about the teaching profession without actually speaking to the teaching profession. Staggering.
I’m not sure how well my part went down: I think it might have annoyed some of ACDE who only wanted to talk about ATARs in ITE – but if that’s the case, they really shouldn’t have claimed to be speaking about the teaching profession, should they?