Brief Introduction To Faculty Professionalization

In higher education system, the faculty is a unique and critical group. As an important subject and core actor in the internal practice of higher education which includes teaching, research and community services, faculty's ideological beliefs, values and morales will directly determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the higher education practice, and will fundamentally affect the academic productivity and social vitality of higher education system.Nowadays, the scale of higher education expands rapidly, and the enrollment expansion directly causes"reactive growth"of the number of faculty members, and the academic productivity and social influence of university are also increasing at a high speed while the quality problem of higher education is becoming increasingly prominent. Throughout the higher education in developed countries, which generally takes faculty professionalization as the orientation for reform and considers improving the quality of faculty as an important way to enhance the quality of higher education, people become increasingly awared that the quality of faculty, the image representative of the university, is the key factor to maintain the school's reputation and status .Based on above-mentioned points, the author attempts to explore the nature and stable factors hidden in the process of faculty professionalization by interpreting the content, carding the goals, studying the history and reflecting the reality, in the hope of making some humble contribution for speeding up the faculty professionalization development in our country.This text is divided into four chapters. Taking academic profession as the logical starting point, the first chapter theorizes the nature content of faculty professionalization through questioning the logic property and the value of academic profession, and analyzing the necessity and inevitability of faculty professionalization. The second chapter defines the goals of faculty professionalization from perspectives of pedagogy and sociology, and points out that there are two goals in the faculty professionalization, one is individual's internal professionalism improvement, the other being groups'external professionalization upgrading. Reviewing the development history of western faculty professionalization, the third chapter analyzes the dynamic mechanism of faculty professionalization. The fourth chapter seriously reflects the realistic dilemma of faculty professionalization from the perspective of sociology, analyzes the potential risk of faculty professionalization,and profoundly inspects the internal and external causes of faculty being treated as a"quasi-profession". The fifth chapter responds to faculty professionalization rationally from three levels: the government, the school and the faculty.