Challenges of teacher professionalization in higher education

Abstract

Phenomena such as the growth or massification and democratization of access to higher education are at the basis of the new role that universities playin developed societies. In this new function, the university definitively ceasesto havea monopoly on research and the academic body ceases to pivot in a balanced way between the traditional functions of research and teaching (gher & Savage, 2020), to fragment into different ways of exercising the profession with different weights for the various functions. Both the loss of the monopoly of research and the need for alliances with the productive sector, as well as the transformation in the vision of the training of professionals (Bourke, 2019), the rise of privatization and theemergence of new institutional formats of Higher Education, have generated the need to increase the processes of accountability to society (Latif et al, 2019) and, therefore, to implement accreditation and evaluation mechanisms based on standards. In this paper we will analyze three of the logics that have been linked to institutional evaluation: accountability, compliance with requirements and improvement. Through these logics, a culture of quality is externally imposed in universities that tends towards excellence and moves internal processes (Pulido, 2005): (a) of resistance or bureaucratization; (b) of adjustment and implementation; (c) or of appropriation and improvement. It is in this third case, in which the teaching action is modeled, strengthening the emergence of novel professional features and functions. All this occurs in a non-uniform manner depending on the nature of each institution concerned and on the stage of professional development of the teacher, his or her expectations, training, and the life cycle of each teacher.