The General Teaching Council (England) Code of Conduct and Practice: myth and meaning .

1. The General Teaching Council (England) Code of Conduct and Practice: myth and meaning. Dr. Fiona Hallett – Edge Hill University, Dr. Damien Shortt – Edge Hill University, Dr. David Spendlove – University of Manchester. Dr. Graham Hardy – University of Manchester.

2. The GTCE and the CoCP. • 1998 Teaching and Higher Education Act – GTCE • to maintain a register of all those teachers qualified to teach in state-maintained schools (currently in excess of 500,000) • to serve in an advisory capacity on educational matters to Government departments • to perform a disciplinary function for the profession • 2004 - CoCP • 2008 – Revised draft CoCP • 2009 – Revised CoCP

3. The 8 principles of the CoCP. • ‘guide everyday judgments and actions’ (GTCE, 2009:02) • Put the wellbeing, development and progress of children and young people first • Take responsibility for maintaining the quality of their teaching practice • Help children and young people to become confident and successful learners • Demonstrate respect for diversity and promote equality • Strive to establish productive partnerships with parents and carers • Work as part of a whole-school team • Co-operate with other professional colleagues • Demonstrate honesty and integrity and uphold public trust and confidence in the teaching profession. (GTCE, 2009:07)

4. Contravening the Code • Romantic relationship with a sixth form student over the age of consent • Shouting excessively, showing favouritism and ridiculing pupils • Failing to plan lessons properly, failing to collaborate with colleagues, failing to produce pupil data, having insufficient strategies for managing pupil behaviour. • Accessing a BNP discussion forum on a school computer • Using facebook / ebay on school computers / during lessons (iphone)

5. Purpose of this paper. • identify a core dichotomous tension at the heart of the Code of Conduct and Practice for Registered Teachers (GTCE, 2009). • Structuralist analysis – reveals underlying moral judgements and binary relationships. • mythologised representation of teacher professionalism or competence demands critique.

6. Structuralismand mythology • Saussure (1986: 65-78) sign, signal and signification. Cat • the sign [cat] can only function if all English speakers are complicit in their acceptance that this particular sign refers to that particular animal – in other words, there needs to be a community of speakers who are willing to have the rules of the language imposed upon them (1986: 71)

7. Structuralist notions of Myth • Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) • myth as a narrative genre (often with didactic functions) • seeks to acquire a deeper understanding of the meaning of various cultural texts and thereby to better understand the society that created them. • Roland Barthes (1915-1980) • contemporary acts of myth-making for political and ideological ends • seeks to use Structuralism to reveal the potential for pernicious ideologies to disguise themselves in seemingly neutral discourses.

8. Structuralist Methodology • The sociological purpose of a myth is to function as ‘a kind of logical tool’ which helps a society to handle problems where experience and theory contradict each other (Lévi-Strauss, 1968: 216)

9. Lévi-Strauss’s Methodology • the meaning of a myth does not reside in isolated elements, but in the ‘way those elements are combined’, in the exact same way in which the rest of language is made of up constituent units - ‘mythemes’ (1968: 211) • the deeper understanding of myths can only be accessed if the text is read both diachronically and synchronically

10. Reading a myth Synchronically • identify the various constituent units from which the myth is comprised • identify which constituent units are related to each other, and assign them an identifying marker

11. Myth tabulation

12. The 8 principles of the Code of Conduct • Put the wellbeing, development and progress of children and young people first • Take responsibility for maintaining the quality of their teaching practice • Help children and young people to become confident and successful learners • Demonstrate respect for diversity and promote equality • Strive to establish productive partnerships with parents and carers • Work as part of a whole-school team • Co-operate with other professional colleagues • Demonstrate honesty and integrity and uphold public trust and confidence in the teaching profession. (GTCE, 2009:07)

14. Mytheme identification • In order to ascertain mythemes, and the core relationships between them, it is necessary to assign a very short descriptor for each column and continuously refine these descriptors, whittling their variety down, until we are left with some core relationships that the eight principles of the Code appear to be addressing and seeking to regulate.

15. Structuralist analysis of the Code and Conduct of Practice for Registered teachers.

16. Structuralist analysis of the Code and Conduct of Practice for Registered teachers.

17. Discussion • In the first four principles of the Code the teacher is positioned in somewhat familiar terms that embrace the ‘moral heart of teaching’ (Hansen, 2000, 2001) signifying, above all, the duty of the teacher to preserve the inalienable rights of the child. • However, in the second four principles the teacher is signified as vulnerable to temptation via individual interpretation of notions of honesty, integrity and professionalism.

18. The role of teacher educators? • As such, the Code presents a space in which we can raise questions regarding the inherent contradictions of the modern condition: we are free, private, individuals but we are also constrained /limited/dependent/social animals. • How far should teacher educators explore such tensions with student teachers? • What would be the benefit of this?

19. Professional and ethical challenges in teaching A resource for trainee teachers and educators

20. References • Barthes, Roland (2009) Mythologies. UK: Vintage. • Dottin, E.S (2009) Professional judgment and dispositions in teacher education Teaching and Teacher Education. 25. 83-88 • General Teaching Council for England GTCE (2009) Code of Conduct and Practice for Registered Teachers. UK: GTCE • Hansen, David T. (2000) Teaching as a moral activity. In:V.A Richardson (ed) Handbook of research on teaching. (4th Edition) Washington D.C: American Educational Research Association. • Hansen, David T. (2001) Exploring the moral heart of teaching: Toward a teacher’s creed. NY: Teachers College Press • Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1968) The Savage Mind. UK: Penguin. • Saussure, Ferdinand de (1986) Course in General Linguistics. USA: Open Court