This chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the volume. It establishes the conceptual foundations of English language teaching as a profession and highlights its complexity. Professional teaching needs to be regarded as a multidimensional process that combines issues pertinent to the classroom context and teaching–learning with institutional and general pedagogical factors. The process of becoming a professional teacher therefore implies an ongoing commitment to educational change and growth. By adopting a broader perspective, practitioners will be able to teach in a manner that is beneficial to students and society alike. This chapter also elucidates the fact that professional language teaching entails the use of culturally and socially embedded communication and an ability to connect pedagogy with language learning. To address these issues successfully, teachers need to engage in ongoing processes of reflection and theorisation of their practice. To conclude the chapter, a synopsis of all the chapters in this book is provided, highlighting the key themes that emerge from each.

This chapter focuses on teacher professionalism. In response to vigorous debates initiated in the disciplines of education and sociology, this issue has been discussed with varying degrees of intensity in the field of English language teaching over the past three decades. The concept of teacher professionalism, however, has an intricate nature. Its complexity partially results from the fact that it cannot be fully explained without linking it to teachers’ professional knowledge, practice, and engagement, teachers’ professional identity, and their ethical conduct, all of which are sophisticated constructs in their own right. The complexity of teacher professionalism is also attributed to its evolution within active and learning communities of English language teachers. With this in mind, this chapter begins with a presentation of important definitions of teacher professionalism. This is supported by a brief examination of the professional standards obligatory for the teaching occupation. These are discussed in relation to three dimensions: professional knowledge, professional practice, and professional engagement. The chapter then explicates the construct of teacher professional identity. This is followed by a concise deliberation on the relationship between professionalism and ethics. The chapter concludes with constructive suggestions for sustaining teacher professionalism.

In this concluding chapter, we give a brief overview of the key themes in the book, emphasizing the importance of care in the relational pedagogy we have been discussing. We argue that practitioners should take children seriously by seeking their perspectives and identifying what matters for them while building common knowledge with them and working relationally to help take forward their social situations of development. But our primary purpose here is to look forward and consider the implications of the subtle skilled work we are advocating for practitioners. Care alone is insufficient. Practitioners who work with children and families need knowledge of child and adolescent development; subject matter knowledge in schools, and for other caring professionals their core professional knowledge, such as legal responsibilities for social workers; and knowledge of pedagogy. The professional interactions with children, families and other practitioners in a relational pedagogy are reciprocal, involving ongoing mutual engagement, where power differences are played down, and professional agency is crucial. Much therefore depends on how institutional leaders mediate government policies: Creating and supporting agentic responsive practitioners is a leadership responsibility. Questions of values therefore crucially underpin the ideas shared in this book.

The theoretical contextualization of undergraduate research is undertaken, on the one hand, within the framework of research-based learning (RBL). RBL is experiencing an enormous expansion worldwide in the context of teacher training and is, on the other hand, located within the professionalization discourse, namely that teacher education must focus on the professional activity as a teacher and help to develop it further. For example, the central aspects of teachers’ professional knowledge consist of a combination of “pedagogical content knowledge,” “general pedagogical knowledge,” “curriculum knowledge,” and “subject matter content knowledge” within the disciplines. Accordingly, university education must enable students to acquire deep and flexible knowledge in order to create the necessary basis for successful teaching/learning processes and enable students to find professional solutions to complex pedagogical problems and social challenges, such as reducing educational inequality and establishing educational justice.