This article explores the development of professional training for youth leaders (now, youth workers) in England and Wales between 1939 and 1945. The article identifies the state's construction of young people as a problematic social category at a time of national crisis and its mobilization of youth leadership as part of the war effort. The Board of Education supported, sometimes tacitly, the development of courses in some universities and voluntary organizations for youth leaders. By 1942 full-time courses of training existed (...) at five universities and university colleges and one voluntary organization and were recognized by the Board under Circular 1598. This article explores tensions between the discourse of voluntarism, in which youth leadership had traditionally been set, and the newly developing discourse of professionalism. The article suggests that these discourses are fundamentally ethical and tensions lay in contested definitions of the ?good youth leader?. Little consensus existed on what counted as the good leader, animating a conflict between voluntarism and state provision. The article concludes by drawing distinctions and continuities between the war years and the present day. (shrink)

Research on teachers’ professional identity integrates many constructs that are treated independently in most cases. This study described the associations between components of teacher professional identity and their association with teachers’ general pedagogical beliefs. Secondary teachers completed a survey about several components of their identity and general pedagogical beliefs. Multidimensional scaling revealed that the components could be mapped on two dimensions: form of motivation and degree of subject specificity. The resulting map revealed four meaningful groups of components. Furthermore, whereas direct (...) transmission general pedagogical beliefs were found to be strongly tied to an identity grounded in the subject taught, constructivist beliefs were independent of identity components. This study provides new insight into the stru... (shrink)

Museum professionalism remains an unexplored area in museum studies, particularly with regard to what is arguably the core generic question of a sui generis professional knowledge base, and its necessary and sufficient conditions. The need to examine this question becomes all the more important with the increasing expansion of the museum’s roles and functions. This paper starts by mapping out the policy and organizational context within which the roles of museums have expanded in the UK. It then situates the discussion (...) of museum professional knowledge within a cross-disciplinary matrix bearing on the question of what is professional about occupations classified—or classifiable—as professions. Against the backdrop of the current organizational context of the museum as well as theories of professional knowledge, it highlights the ways in which museum work, more specifically museography, poses a distinctive set of questions compared to other ‘professional’ fields; the paper thus homes in on the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge in relation to museographic practice and the type of professional knowledge and expertise that can sustain it and enact its creative and educational potentials and affordances. (shrink)