On Amateurism, Professionalism, and Matters of the Heart: A Cross-Border Adventure

This article is a cross-border adventure in two senses of the term. Firstly, it is an adventure in co-authorship that exemplifies how Dewey conceptualises education, namely as a ‘continuous reconstruction of experience’. Secondly, it explores the limitations of a restricted definition of ‘professionalism’, particularly when the term is applied in contexts across the global south. The authors argue that the notion of professionalism has to be conceptualised in relation to a specific social field, where individuals co-exist and interact in ways that are culturally specific. The corollary of this is that due attention should be paid to the language used by people in non-Western contexts to describe the raw effort of the practice of teaching. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, and challenging the norms of conventional academic inquiry, the authors suggest that contemporary constructions of professionalism would be enhanced if they were inflected with a form of amateurism that reinstates the value of ‘knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments’ rather than ‘impersonal theories and methodologies.’