Foundations of teachers’ professional consciousness: the case of secondary school teachers in Cameroun ; Fondements de la conscience professionnelle des enseignants : le cas des enseignants du secondaire au Cameroun

Quality education, professionalism have been, for decades, dominant concepts in education andtraining policy discourse and in the field of research in general. Our research on the foundationsof the professional consciousness of secondary school teachers in Cameroon, is situated in themovement of this thought of the “good”and the “well” implicitly conveyed by these concepts.As a “professional” of education and training, we wanted to satisfy our personal and alsoprofessional curiosity, by focusing on the question of the professional practices and postures ofteachers, who are, more or less, ensuring the quality of education and training of citizens aroundthe world. In other words, we are interested in what teachers base their professionalconsciousness on, understood as “honesty” and “care” in the exercise of their profession. Andthis, by questioning the factors, processes and motives that underlie this professional value. Aqualitative and comprhensive approach has being adopted. The thematic analysis of semidirectional and explicit interviews enabled us to understand that secondary school teachers inCameroon base their professional practices and postures on personal and professionalknowledge, on values that are at the same time sociocultural, moral and political. That theseknowledge and values are built through psychological processes whose ambivalent feelings arethe drivers. And that the need for a strong professional consciousness comes from the sense ofwork for the teacher. These results lead us to question the real effectiveness of the deontologistdiscourses often strongly advocated in the field of education and training, as well as a certainsense of professionalism used as a synonym of efficiency-performance, and thus the indicators,in education, remain difficult to identify. ; L’éducation de qualité, le professionnalisme, sont depuis des décennies des concepts dominantsdans les discours politiques en matière d’éducation et de formation, et dans le champ de larecherche de manière générale. Notre travail de ...