The rise of knowledge workers has been widely heralded but there has been little research on their actual learning practices. This book provides the first systematic comparative study of the formal and informal learning of different professional groups, with a particular focus on teachers. Drawing on unique large-scale national surveys of working conditions and learning practices in Canada, teachers are compared with doctors and lawyers, nurses, engineers and computer programmers, as well as other professionals. The class positions of professionals (self-employed, employers, managers or employees) and their different collective bargaining and organizational decision-making powers are found to have significant effects on their formal learning and professional development (PD). Teachers’ learning varies according to their professionally-based negotiating and school-based decision-making powers. Two further national surveys of thousands of Canadian classroom teachers as well as more in-depth case studies offer more insight into the array of teachers’ formal and informal learning activities. Analyses of regular full-time teachers, occasional teachers and new teachers probe their different learning patterns. The international literature on teacher professional development and related government policies is reviewed and major barriers to job-embedded, ongoing professional learning are identified. Promising alternative forms of integrating teachers’ work and their professional learning are illustrated. Teacher empowerment appears to be an effective means to ensure more integrated professional learning as well as to aid fuller realization of knowledge societies and knowledge economies.

We are living in a defining moment, when the world in which teachers do their work is changing profoundly. In his latest book, Hargreaves proposes that we have a one-time chance to reshape the future of teaching and schooling and that we should seize this historic opportunity. Hargreaves sets out what it means to teach in the new knowledge society, to prepare young people for a world of creativity and flexibility and to protect them against the threats of mounting insecurity. He provides inspiring examples of schools that operate as creative and caring learning communities and shows how years of "soulless standardization" have seriously undermined similar attempts made by many non-affluent schools. Hargreaves takes us beyond the dead-ends of standardization and divisiveness to a future in which all teaching can be a high-skill, creative, life-shaping mission because "the knowledge society requires nothing less." This major commentary on the state of today's teaching profession in a knowledge-driven world is theoretically original and strategically powerful?a practical, inspiring, and challenging guide to rethinking the work of teaching.

This book presents an entirely new approach to professional learning based on perspectives of the knowledge society and, in particular, an interpretation of Knorr Cetina’s work on scientific ‘epistemic cultures’. Starting with a conceptual chapter and followed by a suite of empirical studies from accountancy, education, nursing and software engineering, the book elaborates how: a) knowledge production and circulation take distinct forms in those fields; b) how the knowledge objects of practice in those fields engross and engage professionals and, in the process, people and knowledge are transformed by this engagement. By foregrounding an explicit concern for the role of knowledge in professional learning, the book goes much farther than the current fashion for describing ‘practice-based learning’. It will therefore be of considerable interest to the research, policy, practitioner and student communities involved with professional education/learning or interested in innovation and knowledge development in the professions.

This book addresses common themes relating to the teaching and research nexus in the knowledge-based society through historical, comparative and empirical perspectives. It analyzes traditions of academic systems and national initiatives, and other factors affecting the main characteristics of the teaching and research nexus in eleven case countries from Asia, Europe, North America and South America. The book identifies key challenges of the academy, and trends in relation to the teaching and research nexus. The focus of case countries is on the attitudes and activities of the academy, as reported in the international comparative survey “The Academic Profession in the Knowledge-Based Society” (APIKS) in 2017-18. The data compared with previous international comparative survey “The Changing Academic Profession” (CAP) in 2007-08 in most chapters to make time series changes. The book discusses the teaching and research nexus in the case countries similar to and different from those of reference countries drawing on findings from the international databanks of the two international comparative surveys and previous research.

Teachers Leading Educational Reform explores the ways in which teachers across the world are currently working together in professional learning communities (PLCs) to generate meaningful change and innovation in order to transform pedagogy and practice. By discussing how teachers can work collectively and collaboratively on the issues of learning and teaching that matter to them, it argues that through collective action and collaborative agency, teachers are leading educational reform. By offering contemporary examples and perspectives on the practice, impact and sustainability of PLCs, this book takes a global, comparative view showing categorically that those educational systems that are performing well, and seek to perform well, are using PLCs as the infrastructure to support teacher-led improvement. Split into three sections that look at the macro, meso and micro aspects of how far professional collaboration is building the capacity and capability for school and system improvement, this text asks the questions: Is the PLC work authentic? Is the PLC work being implemented at a superficial or deep level? Is there evidence of a positive impact on students/teachers at the school/district/system level? Is provision in place for sustaining the PLC work? Teachers Leading Educational Reform illustrates how focused and purposeful professional collaboration is contributing to change and reform across the globe. It reinforces why teachers must be at the heart of the school reform processes as the drivers and architects of school transformation and change.