Contemporary global transitions are remaking education as a social institution and re-positioning educators in a lifelong learning political order. In this paper, I reflect on a research project that investigated the teaching occupation in learning societies in order to explain the concept of 'educational work': the form of labour that makes, orients and enacts spaces, which yield learning and build citizen capabilities. I report on a case study of educational work in a global-national lifelong learning space, a small private training provider in Melbourne to illustrate this analysis. The analysis reveals how educators formed, supported and secured an educational space for learning, and its effects on citizen capabilities. I argue that the transition from the political order of public education re-frames and reforms education and the labour of educating that historically formed citizens but it does not dissolve educational work, or the importance of securing citizen capabilities. Understanding 'educational work' as a practice of governing and a contradictory process of making 'subjects' and 'citizens' reframes the debate about 'education' and 'training' and highlights its continuing importance as a means of securing democratic politics.
IntroductionEducational research presents teachers as central actors in both the everyday conduct of schooling and in the institutional formation of public education. However the contemporary transition from national systems of public education towards lifelong learning orders reframes conventional understandings of teachers and teaching. The trajectory towards learner-centred schooling is paralleled by the respatialising and rescaling of learning spaces that bring into view a range of occupational identities that were not previously considered 'teachers' but who now support, develop and recognise learning through the award of credentials.