By Daniel Mucinskas
The June 2018 edition of The Good Project newsletter is now available!
In this edition, we cover a new digital civics toolkit co-created by Carrie James of the Good Play project. We also feature Howard Gardner’s biographical interview in the Harvard Gazette and other interesting links. The Good Idea of the Month is Leadership.
Click here to read the newsletter in full.
In developed countries, few institutions have been as powerfully challenged as the professions. In the 1950s and early 1960s, professions like law, medicine, education, and the clergy were considered to be the gold standard of occupations; talented young people aspired to join their ranks. But in the last few decades, due to a range of factors, professions have become far less attractive occupations, and some experts question whether they can—or should—survive.
In this context, Linda Clarke’s blog post, which we are happy to publish below, is timely and useful. She has developed a scheme, called The Place Model, that delineates factors that influence the status of candidate professions. In applying The Place Model, she points out a variety of professional niches that are currently occupied.
Like many who study the professions, Clarke is skeptical about their claims to be highly respected—in the way that they were a half century ago. Indeed, though she does not go so far as Richard and Daniel Susskind, who wonder whether the professions as we know them are even viable, she is agnostic on the issue.
I also worry about whether, in the future, there will be recognizable professions, with the concomitant status and expertise. But I very much hope that we will continue to value individuals who behave in a professional manner. As we all know, there are certified professionals who disgrace their chosen professions, even as there are workers who may have little status but who behave in responsible and disinterested ways. I want to live in a world where it’s an honor to say of someone, “He or she is behaving like a true professional.”
-Howard Gardner
By Linda Clarke
‘Professional’ is a slippery and overused term, but there are two essential features of what it means to be a professional.
The first of these fundamental characteristics is expertise, which includes both specialized knowledge and skills and trustworthiness. The second, which is often consequent to the first, is esteem. Professionals are learned and are not amateur, their behavior is reliably moral and not capricious or dishonest, and they are, therefore, able to be trusted to carry out complex and important roles.
In order to compare and critique these features, the Place Model (Clarke, 2016) combines:
1. The Geographer’s view of place as an expanding (learning) horizon of developing expertise; and,
2. The Sociologist’s notion of place as public esteem.
In what follows I briefly outline and exemplify the components of the Place Model, which resembles a graph. The sub-heading of the Model asks ‘Who is my professional today?’
Figure 1. The Place Model (Clarke, 2018)
The horizontal axis represents a cumulative, career-long professional learning journey which combines local and global understandings. Crucially, this axis is not a history (not merely a question of time spent on the job).
The vertical axis is based on public perceptions of the esteem in which professionals are held, ranging from low to high.
The intersection of these axes affords the creation of four quadrants, which represent four types of professional workers: proto-professionals, precarious professionals, the deprofessionalised, and the fully professional. A fifth element of the Model sits outside the axes, where the answer to the question ‘Who is my professional today?’ is ‘No one.’
It is possible to populate each of the five sections of the Place Model using illustrative examples drawn from a range of professions in order to bring the model to life and to provoke questions (Clarke, 2016, a workshop for professional educators and their students).
No professional: Outside the axis of the Place Model, there is place to consider, inter alia, areas in which professional expertise is lacking. Consider the plight of the 57 million learners without access to a teacher, the approximately 517 million people in developing countries who are visually impaired because they do not have access to corrective treatment from a doctor, street purveyors of pharmaceutical products from a bucket… and also the current proliferation of ‘virtual’ professionals trained fully online.
Proto-professionals: The term proto–professional has been used here to indicate that this quadrant is home to those aspiring professionals in the first stages of their learning journey or sectors that have not fully achieved professional status. Some professionals may (whether by compulsion or choice) be limited in their learning journey to this quadrant, which can include craftworkers or technicians, increasingly liable to replacement by robots.
Precarious Professionals: At least two worrying and quite contrasting categories of professionals are found in this quadrant: those who might be described as ‘unprofessional’, and those who are unlikely to remain in their profession, the ‘transitory.’ The former engage in a wide range of destructive veniality but may find themselves in this quadrant only if this behavior is exposed. The latter may have limited support or incentive to enable them to remain or progress in their profession.
The Deprofessionalised: This ever- expanding quadrant is also home to strange bedfellows. As retirement ages increase sometimes (and vanishes), it may include ever more of the inveterate cynics whose words and attitudes can discourage both colleagues and clients. In this quadrant, we also find those senior professionals who have been cast down to this place by those who disparage the professions (for example, senior teacher education academics in the UK, dismissed and headlined as ‘the enemies of promise’ by the Secretary of State for Education as he sought to create rhetorical space for reform). The quadrant may also be considered the locus of those migrant and refugee professionals who find that their previous qualifications and experience count for little in their new home; in a world where 1 in every 131 people is a refugee, this is a widespread problem.
Exclusive and Inclusive Professionals: In the original version of the Place Model, the professional quadrant was designated as the home of the virtuous professional who was expert, yet still learning, and likely to be a highly esteemed role model. However, it is more realistic to see this quadrant as also being a smug and snug home to the learned but exclusive professionals, critiqued most thoroughly by Bourdieu and seen by George Bernard Shaw as conspiracies against the laity. We can also construct, at least in theory, a more virtuous conception of inclusive professionals (whilst being aware of the potential for this to be an oxymoron). Thomas More’s concept of Utopia has room for both—in the original Greek, it may mean either ‘no place’ or ‘good place’; of course, reality may be less accommodating. Nonetheless, the other parts of the Place Model point towards potential characteristics of inclusive professionals, for example:
Including those most able but least likely to join the professions;
Professional associations and, indeed, individual professionals choosing to help bring an end to the ‘no professional’ sector or standing up to government ministers who seek to de-skill, technicize and disparage their younger colleagues.
Those working to extend and enhance career trajectories.
Those emphasizing professions (and even ‘new’ professions) to do things which robots do not do well, such as tasks requiring caring and creativity.
In sum, the Place Model is an analytical tool which can be used for re-imagining and comparing all professions, past, present and future. Like all models it is limited, like all maps it is subjective. Nonetheless, in mapping both the varied dystopias of professionals, and identifying an alternative, thinkable utopia (inclusive professionals), the Model provides a useful taxonomy which affords room for both criticality and optimism.
Questions about professionals of course remain, not least whether they are necessary, luxurious, or irrelevant.
Linda Clarke is Professor of Education and Research Director for Education in Ulster University in Northern Ireland.
By Daniel Mucinskas
Howard Gardner in his office
In the summer of 2017, Howard Gardner had a series of conversations with reporters from the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official news website. The topics of these discussions ranged from Gardner’s early life and family to his lifelong scholarly work, including The Good Project.
In May 2018, the Gazette released an in-depth profile of Gardner based on these conversations. We are pleased to share this interview with you, accessible by clicking here. In this piece, Gardner talks about the influences, challenges, surprises, and regrets that have influenced his personal life and career trajectory as a scholar and researcher.
Please feel free to post any reactions or reflections in the comments section below.
By Daniel Mucinskas
The prohibition symbol covers the word “bullying”
Bullying amongst young people is an issue on the minds of many educators today. From high-profile cases that make international news to individual incidents dealt with by single teachers, school-based bullying has been called a crisis, and cultural sensitivity around the topic seems to have increased in recent years. Many strategies have been suggested to help prevent bullying behavior, especially as harassment and efforts to counter it have transitioned to the digital arena with the rise of social media.
We recently spoke with Lucie Cadova, a high schooler from the Czech Republic. Lucie is part of a group of students who, in response to bullying in their schools, teamed up to create a platform called FaceUp. FaceUp is an app and companion website that allows users to anonymously report bullying or harassing behavior that they witness, making it possible for students who do not feel comfortable speaking up in person or aren’t sure who to consult to use the program to send information which is then transmitted to the appropriate administrators at their schools.
Below, Lucie answers a couple of our questions about this initiative.
Q: What made you want to create an app to help combat bullying in schools?
Lucie: I decided to get involved in this project because, for many people, high school life has been anything but rainbows and unicorns. My peers and I were all burdened by firsthand experiences with bullying – some of us as victims, others as silent spectators who wish they had known just how to speak up. Those experiences made us realize that we would love to help fellow students overcome these things and make school an easier place for them.
As the internet often becomes an instrument for bullying and harm nowadays, we decided to turn this capability around and use anonymity for something good. FaceUp allows students to report bullying anonymously and hopefully allow people to speak up for themselves or for other people who may be facing problems of any nature, without the fear of being exposed.
Q: Why is preventing bullying important for students’ social and emotional development?
Lucie: Millions of kids get bullied daily, which is horrifying. Thousands of children are worried to come to school every day in the US alone. But many of them will never say anything to anyone for various reasons. It’s hard to solve bullying problems or to help someone if you don’t know what’s happening, which is exactly why prevention is necessary. It’s better to stop incidents from happening in the first place, rather than to only find out about them after they have happened. Prevention has the power to minimalize harm because its aim is primarily not even to give harm a chance to occur.
From the point of view of social and emotional development, I believe it is important to give youth a safe and friendly environment to grow up in, because the effects of your environment on your development will show in adulthood. During school years, teens are in a fragile state because our bodies and minds are still developing. We need to ensure that this process going smoothly, since it is essential to the formation of healthy adults.
Q: What are some practical tactics you may have observed in schools that encourage positive social climates for students?
Lucie: I believe communication is the key. It’s important not to overlook problems that may be happening and to teach kids about them and the consequences. We’ve seen programs that encourage a hate-free culture; we’ve seen teachers trying to make kids actually think about what is wrong and why. I think that instead of only saying what is right and wrong, it’s much more effective to help students find out themselves by living it.
It’s also necessary to promote empathy and helpfulness in schools, which can be done through practices as simple as team activities. There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to encourage a positive climate. I am no professional in the area, only a student who’s been through school. In the end, I believe that initiatives that encourage positive social behavior may help students think about what can we do for others. Programs like this may even be the thing that brings us to the point where we no longer want to just stand by, but instead actively help to create a positive climate for other students, too.
For more information about FaceUp, please click here.
By Daniel Mucinskas
Howard Gardner, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, the three founders of the Good Work Project, have been recognized among the fifty most influential living psychologists in an online ranking by TheBestSchools.org.
Howard Gardner comments below on this news.
Generally speaking, I pay little attention to rankings. To be sure, it’s nice to be ranked higher, rather than lower. But I am sufficiently familiar with the process to know that one can easily finagle the ratings; and that they are, at best, a very imperfect index of quality, however scrupulously they are assembled and displayed.
That said, I was pleased to see the list of “The 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists in the World” as determined by The Best Schools. On that list were my close colleagues Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi and William (Bill) Damon, and me.
In 1994-1995, the three of us had the privilege of full-year fellowships at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. And it was there that we conceived of a ten year project—a study of the professions—which came to be called “The Good Work Project.” That project yielded ten books, scores of articles, and various tools for the workplace. Until this day, almost a quarter of a century later, we each continue our own work in the spirit of the original project—in my case, under the title “The Good Project.”
I am pleased to thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for enabling this collaboration and to salute Mike and Bill, my close colleagues and friends—now recognized as “influential psychologists.”
Congratulations to the three founders on their inclusion!
