Young teacher union activists' views and experiences of involvement, voice, and agency in their union and its influence on their concept of professionalism

• Main Author: Gilliland, Alison
• Published: University of Nottingham 2018
• Subjects: LB2300 Higher education
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.740721

This qualitative study, underpinned by the philosophical assumptions of con-structivism (Guba and Lincoln, 2005) uses semi-structured interviews to ex-plore the views and experiences of 15 young Republic of Ireland teacher union activists with regard to their union involvement and its influence on their con-cept of professionalism. In particular it explores how they became active in their union, the INTO, how they experience voice and agency and how they conceive teacher professionalism. Navarro’s (1992) concept of voice, Priestley et. al.’s (2013, 2015) framework for teacher agency and Stevenson’s (2014) new democratic professionalism are used to underpin and support the study. Analysis of the data garnered allowed pertinent findings to be synthesised and new learning to be gained. The study identified the role of union capital in sup-porting young member involvement and activism. It evidenced voice and self-efficacy beliefs as enabling the realisation of agency thus suggests a redefining of Priestley et. al.’s (2013, 2015) framework and presents a new teacher union contextualised conception of agency. Drawing on Stevenson’s (2014) new democratic professionalism, the study also presents a conception of profession-alism influenced by teacher unionism as evidenced by the data. Finally, it sug-gest that when teacher union contextualised agency interacts with teacher un-ion influenced professionalism the dynamic can be conceived as teacher union influenced agentic professionalism.