Maintaining, Reconstructing and Creating Tradition in Education

Abstract

Against the background of a society living after the 'end of tradition', this mostly theoretical paper develops a conceptualisation of the nature of tradition and discusses the central role it still plays in the construction of teachers' professional and schools' institutional identities. In doing so, the paper speculates on the degree to which currently there is taking place in education a reinvention of established and very familiar pedagogic and school traditions alongside the creation and emergence of new ones. It also suggests that reflections along these lines may provide a theoretically innovative way of bridging the gap between micro-institutional and macro-social analyses of teachers' work.