"Year-on-year cuts to teachers' pay, workload spiralling out of control,
deprofessionalisation, demoralisation and denigration, and the consequence is an unacceptable toll on teachers' health and wellbeing.
"Year-on-year cuts to teachers' pay, workload spiralling out of control,
deprofessionalisation, demoralisation and denigration and the consequence is an unacceptable toll on teachers' health and wellbeing.
A growing body of research decries NAPLAN testing, claiming that it stresses students and parents (Mayes & Howell, 2017; Rothwell, 2017), narrows curriculum (Caldwell & White, 2017; Exley & Singh, 2011), contributes to the
deprofessionalisation of teachers (Cormack & Comber, 2013) and promotes teaching to the test (White & Anderson, 2012).
Such levels of accountability are associated with a neoliberal emphasis on performativity and
deprofessionalisation of academics (Olsson & Peters, 2005).
The authors attribute a number of key factors to this current tension within higher education, including: (1) the
deprofessionalisation and casualisation of academic staff; (2) the digitisation of curriculum, pedagogy and research practices; (3) the commercialisation of research grants and funding; (4) the instrumentalisation of universities to serve the labour market; and (5) massification and the rise of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (pp.
Early-career academics can no longer rely on regular hours of teaching across the academic year, as an even cheaper layer of teaching staff--graduate teaching assistants--has been introduced to replace hourly-paid contracts/associate lectureships in an endless cycle of
deprofessionalisation and cost cutting.
[Profession in Transition--on the
deprofessionalisation of journalism].
Researchers have analysed the effects of a managerialist-market logic on the relationship between care organisations and their key stakeholders--care recipients, care workers and unpaid carers (King 2007)--and reviewed the conditions of the paid care workforce in community services in Australia, revealing deinstitutionalisation,
deprofessionalisation, functional underemployment, and relatively poor pay (Meagher 2007).
Taken together these trends have reduced the discretion of social professionals, leading to concerns about
deprofessionalisation. Arguably the needs of organisations and national/local budgets have been prioritised above the needs of service users, despite the increasing rhetoric and some efforts to put the client at the centre of services and shift responsibility for choice and expenditure to the <<consumer>> e.g.
As long ago as 1973, Haug's
deprofessionalisation hypothesis painted a bleak picture of the new era of knowledge workers and their talents in the relentless drive towards competitive advantage (also see Holmes, 2008), in which process controls and performance measures will ultimately win out over more subjective notions of "doing a good job" (see Cunningham, 2008).
Finding such a balance whilst caught up in orthodoxies of balkanised curriculum organization, the
deprofessionalisation of teaching, and the increasing use of testing of a few valorised subjects is nigh impossible.