The Salesian Educator as a Professional

The Salesian Educator as a Professional

What makes a Salesian educator a professional?

What makes a professional a Salesian educator?

Maria Theresa H. Alvarez

 

The teaching profession shares core values and practices that are vital to the dignity and integrity of any profession and yet in various facets of the so-called “life of a teacher”, there are attributes that are unique. Anybody can be a teacher but not everyone can be an educator. A teacher is someone who was given the responsibility of guiding the learners achieve a set of competencies, understand concepts, and demonstrate attainment of skills. An educator is one who transforms lives through the integrative process of learning – mastering the “what”, applying the “how”, and fulfilling the duties and values that entail the “why”. In the same way that anybody who opts to pursue a baccalaureate degree undergoes that process of professionalization but not everyone can claim the status of being a professional. Profession pertains to the occupation, professionalization is the process leading to the practice of a profession and professional is the person who exhibits the moral qualities relevant to the socio-cultural context within which the profession is practiced and where professionalism is governed by a set of standards.

The terms professionalization and professionalism are often used interchangeably but they are two different things, very far from the notion of being two sides of the same coin. Professionalization is associated with entry requirements, licensing practices, national certification for teachers, and the like and professionalism with the particular expertise, authority, and autonomy of teachers “to determine their work conditions and their effectiveness as teachers” (Orntein and Levine, 1997). Professionalism entails not only teacher’s obligation to educate the young but also a recognition by others – within and outside the profession – of the teacher’s right to decide his or her tasks in the classroom. Teaching, like other professions, embodies “a set of shared norms, values, taken-for granted assumptions and a sense of mission that frame the patterns of the members’ work activities (Okano and Tsuchiya, 1999). Teacher professionalism describes points along a continuum representing the extent to which members of an occupation share a common body of knowledge and use shared standards of practice in exercising that knowledge on behalf of clients. It incorporates conditions of specialized knowledge, collective self-regulation, special attention to the unique needs of clients, autonomous performance and a large dose of responsibility for client welfare (Darling-Hammond, 1990).

 Hoyle (1980) portrays professionalism as the quality of one’s practice. That is, the behaviors exhibited by a professional teacher are what identify a teacher’s professionalism. Similarly, Hurst and Reding (2000) associate specific behaviors with teacher professionalism. The focus of professionalism is on the quality of a person's professional practice. Professionalization is concerned with the status of the occupation. “Many are called, yet, very few are chosen.”  Each one of us who make the classroom our world were professionalized but are we all professional? Professionalization can land you a job but professionalism would help you build a life-long career. Paraphrasing the words of Robert Frost - those who took the less traveled road are the ones who really made the difference.

Teachers are those persons officially assigned responsibility for educating the young so that they can participate in their culture; hence the teacher has an important role in equipping students with skills that will enable them to think, reason, and manipulate ideas (Ryan and Cooper, 1998). Societal expectations of teachers include not only tasks that are identifiable and measurable but also duties that are less clearly defined. Pincoffs (1973) has referred to the more easily measured tasks as “determinate”, describing the less measurable tasks as “indeterminate”. Whether or not they defined as standards – and regardless of the governance level at which any standard might be articulated – societies maintain certain curricular expectations. But societies expect their students to achieve other harder-to-define competencies [aside from the subject-defined determinate work] (Kubow and Fossum, 2007).

Needless to say, the professional teacher faces a lot more responsibilities and even more serious accountabilities as compared with other professions. Students would often wonder why there are so many rules to follow in the classroom, why teachers impose so many formatting styles, criteria for proper behavior, stringent rules and study habits, etc. But as a professional, educators are challenged to comply with even more expectations and are required to manage accountabilities to all the stakeholders involved in the education enterprise. A set of rules and guidelines, disguised as ethical practices, demands that educators portray accordingly their political, social, cultural, spiritual-moral, legal, and personal accountabilities. Exactly when does the duties and responsibilities of an educator culminates is an example of an indeterminate measured task.

 Another challenge of being a professional and a requirement to deserve the status of being an educator is the commitment to a life of learning and the courage to face the risks and overcome the threats of the 21^st century. A crucial and yet not so well-known theory in evolutionary biology called “The Red Queen Effect” indicates that to be able to survive successfully in the ever-changing environment, organisms must be able to adapt continuously. Failure to do so could lead to a significant decrease in fitness; eventually, extinction. In the teaching profession, specifically in maintaining the sustainability and relevance of being a Salesian educator, there is a great need for teachers to become more effective and efficient, innovative and flexible, determined and focused to be able to accompany the young towards the path of truth. The path of truth is guided by a strong faith in Jesus, commitment to the Sacraments, deep devotion to Mary, and a translation of the teachings of the Catholic Church through the academic context that the educator conveys in the classroom.  This path of learning is always the more difficult one but the challenge is how to stay on track. Indeed, the career of a teacher has two faces – intellectual and moral, which Hugh Sockett refers to as the moral base of teacher professionalism. A professional teacher loves two things –learner and knowledge. A true Salesian educator has two powerful tools – love of God and high sense of professionalism.

On a lighter note, educators should be more grateful because at least we belong to the “thinking” profession. It is a common knowledge in biological science that unlike other cells that normally complete a life-span, die and replaced in a relatively short time, nerve cells or neurons aren’t replaced. Majority of them lasts for a person’s entire life. Various researchers have shown that the more frequent a nerve cell is used, the more dendrites it sprouts. On the contrary, they may die a natural death if they aren’t used. At least knowing this trivia would hopefully inspire us to go for further studies. Deep and analytical thinking would lessen a teacher’s chance of developing Alzeihmer’s or Dementia. Give yourself a path on the shoulder if this gives you a consolation. Personally, I thank God I chose the teaching profession. Every day that I make the classroom my world, I am given the opportunity to live out Paulo Freire’s maxim: “I work, and working I transform the world”.