Teachers’ Work

Teachers’ Work is a highly readable, penetrating and often amusing account of the reality of teachers working lives, as relevant to the profession and its future as it was when first published in 1985. Based on the classic Australian study of the schools and homes of the wealthy and powerful and of ordinary wage-earners described in Making the Difference, Teachers’ Work draws on extended interviews with teachers in elite private schools and mainstream government high schools and with the students and parents who attend and patronise them. As well as providing an absorbing account of the life and work of teachers through vivid portraits of people, classrooms and staffrooms, Teachers’ Work illuminates the interaction between personal relationships in the classroom and the social structures of gender and class. In generating new ways of thinking about the character and origins of inequality in education, this book gives teachers themselves cause for reflection, offers student-teachers a picture of the real world of teaching, and provides parents with an insight into daily life behind the classroom door. At a time when the power of ‘effective teaching’ is being widely recognised and national debate focuses on the condition and prospcts of the teaching profession, Teachers’ Work is as insightful and rewarding as ever.