Chapter 10: Professional Development for “Professional Pedagogues”: Contradictions and Tensions in Reprofessionalizing Teachers in Cyprus

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the contradictions and tensions that emerged in the ways in which elementary school teachers in the Republic of Cyprus perceived their (re)positioning as “autonomous professional pedagogues” by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC, 2004) as part of the comprehensive reform of the Greek-Cypriot public educational system. This is examined in relation to their notions of appropriate professional development (PD) during curriculum change in the year 2010–2011, when new curriculum texts were published and PD was organized by the MoEC to introduce these texts to teachers. Attending to teachers’ narrations relating to the PD they had experienced and that which they desired, this analysis makes evident the complexities of teachers’ (re)positioning as a process that involved both openings and constrictions. We thus argue that the teachers’ critiques unveiled possibilities for teachers’ professionalization as decision-makers, the democratization of the process of new curriculum introduction/implementation, and the establishment of more participatory forms of PD, which would facilitate their visibility as a professional group and destabilize existing institutional hierarchies. However, teachers’ concurrent requests for direct guidance and support (re)confirmed their positioning as receivers of knowledge and as implementers of others’ plans, which draws heavily on their historical experience as public servants in a centralized educational system wherein state-mandated official curricula and textbooks have been imposed by (more expert) others, usually ministry technocrats. It is this complexity that we illustrate through our analysis and raise questions about teacher professionalism, PD, and curriculum change, at a time when teachers’ professionalism in the “successful implementation” of the new curriculum was discursively stressed at the policy level; yet at the same time, this official rhetoric worked towards their deprofessionalization, as subjection to existing institutional and social hierarchies remained largely unchallenged.