Richard Schramm, Director of Education Programs at the National Humanities Center, oversees the high school faculty development program, the summer institutes for high school teachers, the Jessie Ball duPont Seminars for Liberal Arts College Faculty, and TeacherServe, the Center's on-line curriculum enrichment service for high schools, which will be available in the fall of 1997.

      "The teaching profession, from within, has been transforming itself from a semiprofession to a real profession, one based on knowledge and the responsible application of that knowledge." So wrote the authors of Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning, a report recently published by the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education (NFIE). The National Humanities Center has been promoting this process of internal transformation for several years, largely through its program of professional development seminars for high school teachers, cited as a "best practice in professional development" by the Public School Forum of North Carolina. The seminars begin by asking teachers in a school to propose a topic for collective study. They then bring the teachers into collaboration with consulting scholars who help them turn their topic into a rigorous seminar, which the consultants and the teachers explore together over an academic year.

We recognize certain fields of endeavor as professions because there is much more at stake in their conduct than the successful completion of day-to-day tasks. They are professions, in part, because they deal with values fundamental to a society.

        The Center inaugurated these seminars six years ago. When we started, we thought teachers would choose subjects they taught. We envisioned seminars on the Industrial Revolution or African-American literature. Instead, teachers posed much broader questions. They selected topics such as American identity, race, community, and contemporary ethics. The seminar developed by teachers at Bertie County High School in Windsor, North Carolina, is typical. They called their program "The Stories We Tell Each Other: Racial Dialogue in Contemporary America." With the help of scholars from nearby East Carolina University, they put together a syllabus that included works by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, former Center Fellow Anthony Appiah, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and former Center Fellow and Trustee John Hope Franklin. To guide their discussion, they established a series of framing questions: How did the differences between white and black culture originate? How do these differences define race in America today? What happened to the vision of racial community that seemed to be emerging in the 1960s?

        The topic picked at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio, Texas, further illustrates what is on the minds of America's teachers. They have decided to examine how their students make sense of their experience by exploring what one scholar has called "the public worlds of inherited meaning" that African-American and Hispanic-American cultures offer. The teachers plan to rely heavily on autobiography and fiction.

        Seminars such as these have a direct impact on teaching. They provide new curriculum material and promote the use of seminar instruction. They serve another purpose as well, one that reflects the transformation of teaching from a semiprofession to a profession. In all fifteen of the secondary school seminars the Center has organized, teachers have, in one way or another, raised the same questions, irrespective of the subject of their inquiry. They have asked themselves where they and what they do fit into the rapidly changing America they encounter everyday in their classrooms. In each seminar they have wrestled with the big self-reflexive questions of role, purpose, and meaning that practitioners must address if their particular field is to be considered a profession.

        As a result of the NFIE's report and others like it, the call to reinvent professional development for teachers is intensifying. This is welcome and long overdue. As professional development gets reinvented, however, we would do well to keep in mind the lesson of the Center's seminars. Given the opportunity to select topics of importance to them, teachers did not choose the narrowly practical or pedagogical or even subjects with self-evident, immediate curricular applicability. They had larger questions on their minds.

        As we redesign professional development, we must understand that these larger questions are not frivolous or tangential. Indeed, they are among the very matters that make teaching a profession. We recognize certain fields of endeavor as professions because there is much more at stake in their conduct than the successful completion of day-to-day tasks. They are professions, in part, because they deal with values fundamental to a society. Thus, they have a responsibility to give their practitioners the opportunity to step back from the tedium of daily practice and reflect upon how the profession is affecting society and how society is affecting it. They have a responsibility to ask big questions.

        If teaching is ever to achieve the status of a profession, it must tackle such questions. That is not to say that every program of professional development must focus on overarching issues of purpose and meaning. However, if those of us who are trying to reinvent professional development for teachers do not create opportunities for such reflection, we shall have succeeded only in relabeling "staff development," and teaching will remain the semiprofession it is today.

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Last modified: October 1997
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