Parents as Educators: A 'Good Work' Perspective

by Kirsten McHugh

Typically, parents and teachers have complementary roles, and can function in relative independence from one another. This has not been a typical year. In 2020, except in places where children are physically back at school full-time, parents (whether they felt they signed up for the task or not) have had a new assignment thrust upon them--that of teacher. For many, in addition to being “good parents”, and/or “good workers”, parents are now figuring out how they can also be “good teachers” to their children. There is now a lot of serious discussion among parents who are understandably overwhelmed by this proposition. 

The average parent has little to no experience being in a teaching position—save for the chaotic few months last spring when the entire educational system was abruptly thrust into remote learning. At the time, most jurisdictions were forced to use clunky but readily accessible educational platforms implemented as a stop-gap at the start of the pandemic. 

The summer break has provided school systems with a chance to integrate their curricula with more specialized online learning software. Teachers have explored new tools to assist in their technological pedagogy while simultaneously transferring in-person teaching materials into digital formats. There has been a lot of debate over whether and how schools will reopen and if so, whether or not parents will send their children in or keep them home (that is, if this is a decision they have the luxury of making). There has been far less discussion about how to support parents as they prepare for the fall: circumstances have given them a new role within the educational system, but are parents able to take it on? Should they?

We here at The Good Project are not experts in how to balance all of the competing demands on parents, but we hope that our tools and ideas can provide some ways for parents to think about how they plan to approach the situation. As an example, parents might consider approaching the situation through the lens of the 3 E’s of Good Work: excellence, ethics, and engagement. 

Engagement

Engagement might be the most challenging of the 3 E’s for parents to embody in their support of remote learning during the current crisis. This is a stressful time for each and everyone one of us. The pandemic and the upheaval of our regular lives has been jarring. This stress is a direct obstacle to engagement. 

The scenarios parents now face are wide-ranging. For one, the age of the children plays a huge role in parents’ experiences during this time. Parents of young children, such as myself, are trying to keep little ones engaged and entertained, those of older children are trying to find ways to balance staying involved without hovering. Parents of college-aged students have their own set of issues. Many want to treat their “children” as the adults they are but are torn about what the “right” thing to do is in such unprecedented times.

Another consideration is whether or not one or both parents are working and if so, whether that work is full-time, part-time, in the home or outside of the home. Some parents are still able to access childcare and/or in-person schooling (at least at this point), while others are not so fortunate. 

I have a toddler and a preschooler at home. This year our preschool chose to remain closed, and childcare is unavailable. We will attempt to work on pre-K skills with my oldest, while desperately trying to keep our youngest from her favorite activities of mayhem and destruction. My husband works full-time outside the home, and I fit remote working hours into mornings, evenings, nap-time, and (mostly) weekends. One other team member has an elementary school aged child who is learning remotely at home. With both parents working full-time jobs also remotely, there is frustratingly little time to fully engage as “assistant teachers.” Another team member has college-aged “children.” She has described an entirely distinct set of issues around learning to let go in order to allow these young adults to make their own decisions in how they approach their schooling this year. Her family has had multiple conversations about sharing and balancing household tasks (cleaning, laundry, preparing meals, walking the dog) as well as negotiating tight space for 4 separate but often simultaneous Zoom meetings. We also have a grandfather on the team who is working on “higher education capital“ with his high school age grandson, while his wife (grandma) is working on the 3Rs with her younger granddaughters.  They hope to aid in relieving parents and cementing generational bonds.Parents who work in “essential” roles often don’t have the luxury of being physically present. Some parents who are unable to stay home must ask older siblings and family members to watch over their youngest children. These examples are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the range of experiences for parents at this time. 

How can each of us be “engaged” as parent-teachers while also staying “engaged” with our work? The unfortunate truth is that we can’t be fully engaged in each role at once. One thing we can try to do is be as present and positive as possible when we are able to turn our attention to supporting children’s school work. This is admittedly a tall order, and it won’t always be attainable. Think of it as how you would like to play out the role of parent-teacher on your best day, but know that there will be highs and lows. I can admit as a parent that we will all certainly be exhausted and stressed while working through the coming months. However, when we can muster it, we should try to be positive in our support of children’s learning. 

I am personally trying to think of this E as a quality over quantity. If parents are engaged when available and can make that engagement visible, manifest, the learning may be contagious. We all remember the teachers who inspired us and those who seemed less than enthusiastic about their subject matter. Which approach motivated you to apply yourself? 

Parents might also check in with children (or the whole family) to make sure they are aligned in their understanding of what is “engaging”.  It's important for the parent to adapt their ideas to what the child needs in order to spark interest and engagement (parent-child fit) particularly for young children, and to focus on things that are relevant to their lives for older teenagers.

Finding ways to involve children’s peers will be important (though admittedly difficult to do) at a time of social distancing. As one example, parents may consider socially distanced nature walks or outdoor discussions when the weather permits. Gamification has a huge pedagogical following; many online resources incorporate this type of interactive play as a means of increasing engagement in learning. Our own research hub, Project Zero, has curated a set of resources and tools for remote learning applicable to a range of subjects and grade levels. 

Excellence

Excellence in good work terms means to set the bar high and aim to master the field or role. For all the reasons previously discussed, most parents cannot expect to become masters of subject matter or pedagogy. Luckily, many parents have gone through the same grades and subject matter as their children. That being said, as time has passed, that knowledge is presumably eroded, and new information of all sorts has also likely emerged. 

Fortunately, this isn’t 1918. We have a wealth of information readily (and often freely) available. In person research at libraries may be off limits at the moment, but sites like Khan Academy, Coursera, and edX offer a slew of classes for little to no cost. If students are struggling with a particular topic, it is possible to supplement learning in short-time and without expending additional financial resources. 

This could also be a great time to sub-in grandparents or other available close trusted friends or relatives over Zoom or Facetime. It seems that spare time is either a feast or famine for those who are quarantining at home. If you know someone who is feeling a little stir crazy and looks like they could use a little break from nurturing their sourdough starter, see if they might be game for playing remote tutor from time-to-time. It may be a win-win for at least an hour! 

Good teachers don’t just know their subject, they also know how to effectively translate the information to their students. To be sure, parents won’t become master teachers overnight but, if they have the bandwidth, they can learn enough to at least consider themselves “apprentice teachers.” Again, there are amazing resources available online (some for-profit, while others are free). Another approach parents may consider is to speak with their children’s current and previous teachers to get a sense of what the strategies will be this year, and what has worked well for their child in the past. 

These are just a few examples that we hope can help parents to feel more confident and prepared. That being said, what parents can and cannot take on is entirely relative. Parents need to be flexible and patient with themselves as they navigate the school year. 

Ethics

As a society, we haven’t really had a chance to fully consider the ethics involved as parents help support student learning at home. Surely, parents will need to model ethical standards with their children while they precariously balance the twin roles of nurturer and educator. Children look to parents while developing their own moral compasses and this intensive time of parenting and teaching will expose both the good and the bad. As an example, both online and in-person learning is subject to cheating. Now it will be up to parents along with teachers to ensure that children learn the importance of academic honesty in their work.

Parents who have the means to hire tutors or join in private learning pods might reflect on their privileged position in society. Educational inequity has been a long-standing problem in our country and the pandemic is unfortunately exacerbating the issue. One way of modeling ethical behavior is to consider underwriting those who are less financially secure. This could take the form of donations to local schools for those less privileged; encouraging fellow learning pod members to sponsor the inclusion of a dedicated student who lacks the necessary resources; or contributing to funding towards childcare for essential workers. Many of these essential worker-parents may not be able to afford the expenditures tied to creating a fully functional remote learning environment; but it’s their work that keeps the rest of our society running. There are many obstacles to learning during a pandemic and these are just a handful of ideas of ways that you might consider your responsibility to those outside of your immediate social circle. 

Again, these are just a few examples of how parents might take ethics into account. New scenarios and dilemmas will likely present themselves over the course of the year and with them creative ways to “do the right thing” will also emerge. 

Whether you are a parent, a teacher, neither, or both, what do you think? Do you have any additional idea of ways you plan to embody the 3 Es? Which do you expect to be the most challenging for your family? 

Check out our Value Sort tool to help you think through how your own values might relate to the questions of the 3Es and how you might approach a new role in your own life.

Drawing the Line: Dealing with Difficult Dilemmas

By Howard Gardner

By definition, dilemmas are difficult situations where the optimal course of action is unclear. Recently, two dilemmas facing our society have emerged with considerable force. Not only do they call for resolution, they encourage us to reflect on how best to anticipate, think about, and resolve a range of difficult choices.

Dilemma # 1­   Retaining or Expurgating Names, Monuments, Flags  

In appreciation of their accomplishments or gifts, certain persons or acts have been singled out for recognition.  We name entities after presidents and kings; we mount statues that glorify personalities or actions; we display or give special status to flags, or pennants.  Under what conditions should these forms of recognition be withdrawn and how should that de-valuation be carried out?

Dilemma #2 How Professionals Should Conduct Themselves:  The Case of Journalism

In the wake of the progressive era in the early years of the 20th century, news reporters in the United States were expected to be as objective and disinterested as possible:  just report the facts and leave interpretations and personal views to the side (or, at any rate, to the editorial columns).  This commitment has gradually eroded. Nowadays, reporters frequently have their own twitter accounts in which they do not hesitate to express their own views and attitudes on matters of consequence—and even if these views are not explicitly interwoven into their news reports, the attentive reader knows what the reporter “really” thinks about the personalities and issues being covered.  Should reporters be encouraged, allowed, or prohibited from tweeting on anything related to their day job? And if allowed, should any constraints be placed on these forms of expression?

Recently I have been drawn into discussions of both dilemmas. To be sure, these dilemmas are quite distinct from one another.  And yet, despite such differences, I suggest that they raise similar issues about whether, and, if so, where to draw the line.  Indeed, insights with respect to this pair of dilemmas may prove more useful generally.

In each of the cases, it is straight-forward to delineate the extreme positions: 

With respect to Dilemma #1

Extreme Position A  

The individuals who created the commemoration did so in good faith and, in fact, in most cases, the commemoration has stood the test of time. It is unfair to the originators, and a disservice to history, to attempt to erase the deeds (or, even, the misdeeds) of the past.

Extreme Position B

Any person or entity that is connected to slavery (or criminal activity, racism, misogyny, or some other disreputable act or viewpoint) should not be honored in any public way.  

With respect to Dilemma #2

Extreme Position A

Journalists, like professionals, have been afforded status and a sacred trust to report the news objectively.  Their first and most important obligation is to do everything in their powers to earn and retain that trust. While it is never possible to be confident that one has been completely objective, journalists should strive for this ideal.

Extreme Position B

The vaunted objectivity of journalism has co-occurred with enormous imbalances of power, coverage, and accuracy—some intentional, some incidental.  Journalists have the most detailed knowledge of what has happened and why.  Accordingly, they have the right—even the obligation—to call it as they see it via whatever media are at their disposal. It is never possible to be completely objective.  Thus, journalists should make clear their positions on matters where they are convinced that one party is right, and the other wrong—and equally, with respect to public personalities whose behavior they value or disdain.

With respect to both dilemmas, certain factors may predict the stance that individuals will take.

Extreme position A tends to be taken by older persons, often from the ranks of the better treated demographies.  Extreme position B tends to be taken by younger persons, and particularly those from groups that have not been well treated.  Of course, the generations are just a rough rule of thumb—there will always be other factors that contribute to one’ s stance on vexing issues.

Further, with respect to both dilemmas, some of us are more likely to be absolutists.  Others of us will search for common ground (or compromise or intermediate position) and are more prepared to change our minds.

Speaking for myself, probably reflecting my age, background, and societal niche, I have found myself closer to position A—quite publicly with respect to Dilemma #2. I believe that professions (law, medicine, journalism) represent a formidable human invention over the centuries:  they should be defended as vigorously as possible.  And with respect to Dilemma #1, as a person who is historically-minded, I am doubtful about attempts to re-write history, which we associate with fiction like Orwell’s 1984, and with actual events and periods, such as those of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China (and, alas, more current examples leap to mind).

At the same time, as someone who aspires to think of himself as open-minded—as prepared to change his mind—I have read and listened carefully to those who have put forth alternative perspectives. As I like to put it—on very few matters am I a fundamentalist:  A person with a commitment not to change my mind.  Indeed, with respect to this pair of dilemmas, I am eager to formulate an approach—process—that moves toward a cogent and defensible middle ground.

To achieve this ambitious goal, we should take three steps:

1. A clear delineation of the pros and cons—the rewards and the costs-- of each extreme position

2. An in-depth discussion of what might constitute one or more viable intermediate positions

3. A process for arriving at and adopting that middle ground, giving it a try, and determining whether it has been successful and which significant alterations tweaks might be indicated---including, when necessary, a return to the ‘drawing boards”

Needless to say, as always characterizes issues of consequence, “the devil is in the details.”

To start this process off, here are some consideration:

With respect to the dilemma of commemoration:

• Names, banners/flags/ monuments are not the same; different processes might be appropriate for each form of commemoration; these processes should be spelled out and followed carefully;

• A decision to remove some form of commemoration should not be an attempt to erase it from history; at times  when such a removal is made,  a documentation of the process should be carried out, the reasons for it delineated, and the preservation of that record ensured;

• A decision to retain some form of commemoration does not imply endorsement; indeed, some form of discussion, history, pros and cons should be encouraged, displayed, and periodically revisited;

With respect to the dilemma of the profession of journalism:

• It should be recognized that objectivity/disinterestedness is at most an aspiration, no one can be fully objective or dis-interested;

• Inequities over time in power and influence should be recognized and addressed: If, as an example, editors and reporters have not been representative of the diversity and the demographics of a society, that imbalance should be addressed directly;

• Reporters should have the option of declaring that they will not text or tweet on any public matter, editors should respect that decision, and such reporters should be publicly identified as non-tweeters, just as those who tweet or text already identify themselves in that way;

• Publications should also clarify their position on such extra forms of publicity;

• If, going forth, reporters and editors observe these new guidelines, they should not be sanctioned or fired for earlier violations;

• Across the professions (e.g. law, education, journalism), the same kinds of guidelines should be encouraged and observed.  Indeed, such publicly articulated and carefully executed processes constitute the essence of a profession;

Concluding notes

I would be pleased—but also astonished—if most persons who read these proposals would simply endorse them.  But the point is less to prescribe than propose a process whereby the extreme positions can be bridged.  Extreme absolutist positions rarely make sense in the long run; indeed, they often result in a lurch, an over-reaction in the diametrically opposite direction.

More important, the process of negotiating, of searching for middle ground, may be salutary in itself.  It may be comfortable to be surrounded by people who agree completely with oneself; but it’s preferable to encounter people with whom one may disagree but who seek to find a common ground and to lay out the principles  and the processes that have proved efficacious 

The stance that I am recommending lies at the heart of a broad education—an education in the liberal arts. And while such an education does not always yield individuals who can listen carefully, reflect clearly, and search for a reasonable middle ground, its absence makes such aspirations difficult to achieve.

That is the kind of education that I favor—and the kind of society I would like to live in.

Note: I thank my colleagues on the Good Project for their comments on earlier drafts

© Howard Gardner 2020

Teaching “Good Work” in the Law

A guest post, by John Bliss , Assistant Professor at Sturm College of Law

Imagine you have just graduated from college and that you are deeply concerned about racial justice, pandemics, climate change, global inequality, or other major public policy challenges. Given these concerns, how do you shape an impactful career of meaningful work?

For many, the answer is: Attend law school. As a law professor, I am perhaps a little biased when I say that this is a pretty good answer. Law schools produce a wide range of graduates at the front lines of social justice and other important causes, including the day-to-day work of proficiently helping clients understand and navigate the law. But legal education also has enormous room for improvement, which has been the focus of my empirical research over the past twelve years.

Using a variety of methods and comparing over time and across national contexts, I have been studying how initially idealistic law students tend to drift away from the public-interest values and career aspirations that drew them to law school. This drift appears to be influenced by a range of factors—among them, financial considerations, law school peer culture, traditional legal pedagogy, the law-firm recruiting process, and the limited availability of jobs in full-time public interest legal practice. Law schools cannot easily control all of these factors, but I do believe that we can develop curriculum to help reduce this drift effect.

Working with The Good Project and law faculty colleagues, I have recently been developing such curriculum in the hope that our students will sustain public-interest values, whether those values lead to careers in the non-profit or private sector. I began these efforts in 2017 while a resident fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. During my fellowship, I became acquainted with Professor Howard Gardner and was introduced to the Good Project team that he leads. With support and collaboration from the Good Project, I piloted workshops at Harvard Law School with first-year students focusing on professional identity and public-interest commitments. In my current position at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, I have been expanding this curriculum in collaboration with Professor Alexi Freeman. Professor Freeman is experienced in activist lawyering, writes extensively about how law curriculum can better address social justice causes, and runs the public interest and externship programs at Denver Law. In the past academic year, we recruited 32 public-interest-oriented students into what we call the “1L Public Good Program.” In addition to community building and professional identity workshops, we required our students to engage in 20 hours of pro bono fieldwork in public service settings.

In our workshops, we introduced The Good Project’s “Good Work” perspective and toolkit as we discussed identity, values, theories of justice and social change, and pathways into public-regarding legal careers. We devoted one session entirely to the “triple helix” or “three Es” of Good Work, which is Excellent, Engaged, and Ethical. Because this session was offered remotely via Zoom in the spring 2020 pandemic context, we developed some interactive online tools, including having students collaborate on a Google spreadsheet to list and categorize the traits of Good Work. Students were quick to recognize interrelationships among the three Es. For example, the Excellence category covered technical proficiency but also passion, dedication, inclusiveness, and responsibility to broader communities. We also had students create a “Mentimeter” word map to describe what Good Work would look like for a lawyer. Some of the largest (most frequently cited) terms in the word map were “moral,” “empathetic,” “altruistic,” and “activist.” This exercise revealed students shared values and aspirations for impactful practice. Students also included the term “innovative,” which sparked a discussion of the need to think proactively and outside the box when seeking to address systemic causes of injustice. Finally, we discussed the long-term challenge of seeking “flow” and the integration of personal and professional identities within legal practice. We reminded students that, as Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon put it in Good Work: When Excellent and Ethics Meet, “rich lives include continuing internal conversations about who we are, what we want to achieve, where we are successful, and where we are falling short. … It takes a lifetime to achieve such an integration.”

Student feedback about our pilot run of the 1L Public Good Program has been overwhelmingly positive. They appreciated the community of like-minded peers and faculty, and the opportunity to start mentorship relationships with Professor Freeman and myself rooted in conversations about public service, social change, and Good Work. The students emphasized that this programming helped them stay focused on public interest goals and values during a stressful first year of law school.

We are in the early stages of developing assessment tools that we will use in the coming years to empirically examine how the Program is impacting students. At this point, I am confident in saying that the Program and the application of Good Work in legal education show great promise. Law is a field with enormous potential to promote Good Work, as it draws students who seek careers of intrinsic motivation (Engagement), professional skill (Excellence), and public service impact (Ethics). As a legal educator, I believe it is my job to foster these commitments and help students reflect on what kind of lawyers they want to be and what kind of impacts they want to have. I would be more than happy to be contacted by anyone in professional schools or higher education more generally who is seeking to integrate The Good Project materials into their teaching and curriculum.

What Is A Profession? A Tip

By Howard Gardner

Early September 2019. My wife and I have a free day in Zurich. From a menu offered by our hosts, we decide to take two tours. In the morning, we elect to tour the old city by foot—visiting buildings, gardens, squares, historical landmarks, and shops both old and contemporary. We have a terrific guide, who provides a splendid tour. She is filled with information about the city, past and present. She displays and draws on maps from different historical eras, speaks several languages, and tolerates the range of questions from our group—whether appropriate or foolish, terse or verbose.

After a light lunch, we proceed in the afternoon to our second tour: a walk through the art museum. There, after a brief introduction from an administrator, we pass through several selected galleries—spanning the art world from the middle ages to the contemporary era, from jewels to paintings, from Swiss artists to ones from different corners of the world. Again, we have a terrific guide, who provides an excellent tour. Armed with art books, she makes appropriate references to works that are not in the collection, and also to artists from other art forms. She impresses us with her ability to shift languages, invoke diverse terminology, and draw on appropriate examples from a range of art forms.

We express our gratitude to the guides, who welcome our approbation. But then, a crucial difference emerges. With respect to the first guide, we ask whether we can offer her a tip. She graciously says that the tip is not necessary, but she happily accepts the tip and places it in her hip pocket. A few other members of the tour follow suit.

With respect to the second guide, we do not make a similar gambit. Indeed, it does not ever occur to us. Rightly or wrongly, we believe that the guide would be insulted, and others in our small touring group would question the appropriateness of the gesture.

Why this differentiation? And is it appropriate?

The short answer: the guide in the art museum presents herself as a professional, in her dress and demeanor. She is introduced to us by an administrator at the museum, who calls her “Doctor,” and who describes her educational background. And she treats members of the tour—whose backgrounds as educators are known to her—as peers.

In contrast, the guide of the city simply appears without introduction and is dressed informally. She does not indicate anything about her educational background, nor does she signal any knowledge of the identities of the tourists. And the book of maps to which she occasionally refers appears to have been assembled by herself.

In the cultures with which I am familiar, we tip individuals who serve us, and we don’t tip individuals who present themselves as peers and whom we regard in that way. Just as my wife and I, as professors, would not expect a tip were we to lead a delegation from Colombia or China around campus, so, too, the guide in the art museum might feel belittled if we offered her a tip—though not, perhaps, if we invited her for coffee after her job has been completed.

But is this right? Just because we distinguish traditionally between “service worker” and “peer,” should we? If the competence and essential performance are identical, should we make a distinction based on social labels?

I have no desire to cause an upheaval of the social order—even if I could. (There’s enough of that going on in the world these days!) But there’s a lesson that can be drawn from our experiences in Zurich.

It may well be the case that professions, as we know them, are disappearing from the work landscape. So many roles that used to be carried out by trained professionals are now carried out by paraprofessionals, if not by “bots” or other artificial intelligence devices. To be sure, there may well be physicians and physicists for a while longer; but even these individuals may be trained quite differently—perhaps no longer going to professional schools, perhaps no longer placing a few letters of the alphabet before or after their proper names.

What do I hope will remain? A sense of what it means to be a professional: to be well educated, to treat all individuals with dignity, to be proud of the work role that you have adopted, and—most crucial—to recognize ethical dilemmas, to ponder them, to try to do the right thing in difficult circumstances, and, whatever one decides, to seek to learn from one’s mistakes and to do better the next time. Traditionally we expect this kind of deportment from those who are called professionals; but I would like this set of attributes to be expected equally from both of our guides, and therefore, to be able to think of and treat them equivalently.

I would be saddened if we lost a sense of professionalism.

The Place Model: Are Inclusive Professionals an Ideal or Oxymoron?

In developed countries, few institutions have been as powerfully challenged as the professions. In the 1950s and early 1960s, professions like law, medicine, education, and the clergy were considered to be the gold standard of occupations; talented young people aspired to join their ranks. But in the last few decades, due to a range of factors, professions have become far less attractive occupations, and some experts question whether they can—or should—survive.

In this context, Linda Clarke’s blog post, which we are happy to publish below, is timely and useful. She has developed a scheme, called The Place Model, that delineates factors that influence the status of candidate professions. In applying The Place Model, she points out a variety of professional niches that are currently occupied.

Like many who study the professions, Clarke is skeptical about their claims to be highly respected—in the way that they were a half century ago. Indeed, though she does not go so far as Richard and Daniel Susskind, who wonder whether the professions as we know them are even viable, she is agnostic on the issue.

I also worry about whether, in the future, there will be recognizable professions, with the concomitant status and expertise. But I very much hope that we will continue to value individuals who behave in a professional manner. As we all know, there are certified professionals who disgrace their chosen professions, even as there are workers who may have little status but who behave in responsible and disinterested ways. I want to live in a world where it’s an honor to say of someone, “He or she is behaving like a true professional.”

-Howard Gardner

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By Linda Clarke

‘Professional’ is a slippery and overused term, but there are two essential features of what it means to be a professional.

The first of these fundamental characteristics is expertise, which includes both specialized knowledge and skills and trustworthiness. The second, which is often consequent to the first, is esteem. Professionals are learned and are not amateur, their behavior is reliably moral and not capricious or dishonest, and they are, therefore, able to be trusted to carry out complex and important roles.

In order to compare and critique these features, the Place Model (Clarke, 2016) combines:

1. The Geographer’s view of place as an expanding (learning) horizon of developing expertise; and,

2. The Sociologist’s notion of place as public esteem.

In what follows I briefly outline and exemplify the components of the Place Model, which resembles a graph. The sub-heading of the Model asks ‘Who is my professional today?’ 

Figure 1. The Place Model (Clarke, 2018)

The horizontal axis represents a cumulative, career-long professional learning journey which combines local and global understandings. Crucially, this axis is not a history (not merely a question of time spent on the job).

The vertical axis is based on public perceptions of the esteem in which professionals are held, ranging from low to high.

The intersection of these axes affords the creation of four quadrants, which represent four types of professional workers: proto-professionals, precarious professionals, the deprofessionalised, and the fully professional. A fifth element of the Model sits outside the axes, where the answer to the question ‘Who is my professional today?’ is ‘No one.’

It is possible to populate each of the five sections of the Place Model using illustrative examples drawn from a range of professions in order to bring the model to life and to provoke questions (Clarke, 2016, a workshop for professional educators and their students).

No professional: Outside the axis of the Place Model, there is place to consider, inter alia, areas in which professional expertise is lacking. Consider the plight of the 57 million learners without access to a teacher, the approximately 517 million people in developing countries who are visually impaired because they do not have access to corrective treatment from a doctor, street purveyors of pharmaceutical products from a bucket… and also the current proliferation of ‘virtual’ professionals trained fully online.

Proto-professionals: The term proto–professional has been used here to indicate that this quadrant is home to those aspiring professionals in the first stages of their learning journey or sectors that have not fully achieved professional status. Some professionals may (whether by compulsion or choice) be limited in their learning journey to this quadrant, which can include craftworkers or technicians, increasingly liable to replacement by robots.

Precarious Professionals: At least two worrying and quite contrasting categories of professionals are found in this quadrant: those who might be described as ‘unprofessional’, and those who are unlikely to remain in their profession, the ‘transitory.’ The former engage in a wide range of destructive veniality but may find themselves in this quadrant only if this behavior is exposed. The latter may have limited support or incentive to enable them to remain or progress in their profession.

The Deprofessionalised: This ever- expanding quadrant is also home to strange bedfellows. As retirement ages increase sometimes (and vanishes), it may include ever more of the inveterate cynics whose words and attitudes can discourage both colleagues and clients. In this quadrant, we also find those senior professionals who have been cast down to this place by those who disparage the professions (for example, senior teacher education academics in the UK, dismissed and headlined as ‘the enemies of promise’ by the Secretary of State for Education as he sought to create rhetorical space for reform). The quadrant may also be considered the locus of those migrant and refugee professionals who find that their previous qualifications and experience count for little in their new home; in a world where 1 in every 131 people is a refugee, this is a widespread problem.

Exclusive and Inclusive Professionals: In the original version of the Place Model, the professional quadrant was designated as the home of the virtuous professional who was expert, yet still learning, and likely to be a highly esteemed role model. However, it is more realistic to see this quadrant as also being a smug and snug home to the learned but exclusive professionals, critiqued most thoroughly by Bourdieu and seen by George Bernard Shaw as conspiracies against the laity. We can also construct, at least in theory, a more virtuous conception of inclusive professionals (whilst being aware of the potential for this to be an oxymoron). Thomas More’s concept of Utopia has room for both—in the original Greek, it may mean either ‘no place’ or ‘good place’; of course, reality may be less accommodating. Nonetheless, the other parts of the Place Model point towards potential characteristics of inclusive professionals, for example:

• Including those most able but least likely to join the professions;

• Professional associations and, indeed, individual professionals choosing to help bring an end to the ‘no professional’ sector or standing up to government ministers who seek to de-skill, technicize and disparage their younger colleagues.

• Those working to extend and enhance career trajectories.

• Those emphasizing professions (and even ‘new’ professions) to do things which robots do not do well, such as tasks requiring caring and creativity.

In sum, the Place Model is an analytical tool which can be used for re-imagining and comparing all professions, past, present and future. Like all models it is limited, like all maps it is subjective. Nonetheless, in mapping both the varied dystopias of professionals, and identifying an alternative, thinkable utopia (inclusive professionals), the Model provides a useful taxonomy which affords room for both criticality and optimism.

Questions about professionals of course remain, not least whether they are necessary, luxurious, or irrelevant.

Linda Clarke is Professor of Education and Research Director for Education in Ulster University in Northern Ireland.