Becoming and Being a Teacher: The Influence of the National Context

At a time when many education systems are facing major changes in national policy, there is an ever-growing interest in teachers since they will ultimately be responsible for implementing the changes envisaged. Yet despite the enormous volume of research on teachers and teaching that now exists, we still know relatively little about the sources of influence which shape the way teachers build up a view of their role. Clearly there are many factors which contribute to the shaping of teachers' professional perspectives including their own personal and social background, their professional training, their policies and practices in the school in which they work, their access to collegial influence and professional development and the individual's personality. One overlooked source of influence is that of the education system itself. There is an all-too-common tendency for scholars to refer to 'teachers' when what they really mean is teachers in a particular country. The project reported here takes as its starting point the hypothesis that teachers' professional perspectives and their practice will be strongly influenced by the ideological traditions and prevailing policy directives of the national education system within which they work. This goes beyond merely recognising the national context as one source of influence in favour of actively utilising the comparative context to distinguish constant from more variable elements in teachers' perspectives. It therefore offers one example of the potential of cross-national comparison as a methodology within educational research, and specifically for studying teachers in primary schools. The fact that comparative studies of this kind are relatively rare, despite their undoubted strength, testifies to the methodological difficulties involved. Funding bodies are rightly wary of supporting research that may only result in a national case-study or in studies of particular aspects of educational provision where the salient for the sponsor country is either left implicit or deduced without due regard to the critical influence of the mediating national contexts. Much comparative educational research still lacks both theoretical and methodological rigour, either because educational systems are chosen for comparison on the basis of convenience rather than logic, or because no attempt has been made to build on the comparisons to formulate more general insights into the relationship between education and society. In designing the Bristol-Aix project, we were aware that there are particular methodological problems that needed to be addressed. One such is the issue of