Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in France, Guinea, and the USA since 1976 and inspired by Tao (2016), a holistic view of teachers’ work includes not only pedagogical and other labor at school, but also labor to support one’s own family, challenging deficit talk about “teacher quality.”

Paper long abstract:

This essay proposes a holistic view of teachers’ work inspired by my field experiences studying teachers’ thinking and teachers’ work in three countries—France, the Republic of Guinea, and the United States—from 1976 to the present. It builds on the priorities in teachers’ lives, framed by Sen’s Capabilities Approach, that Sharon Tao identified in work with teachers in Tanzania and Nigeria. Thus it considers not only pedagogical work in the classroom and other work done in or for the school, but also family care work that teachers do to sustain their own households. Across contrasting settings in Europe, West Africa and North America, a holistic vision reveals that teachers have reasonable reasons for carrying out pedagogical work and school work as they do, even when work to earn a living or nurture family detracts from ideal pedagogy or actually hinders student learning. This essay illustrates that in affluent as well as "lower-income" countries the need to make a living, in gendered context, shapes teachers’ work and indeed the original choice of teaching as a profession. It also reminds reformers focused on the “quality” of teachers and of teaching to begin by asking, “What are the lives of teachers in this school like? How will the reform I propose interact with work they are already doing in the classroom, in the school, or at home?”