Teaching as a Helping Profession: 5 Essential Qualities
4. Teaching as a Helping Profession
The concept of support is essential to understanding the essence of educational work and its professional nature. In the modern economic classification of work, teaching falls within the tertiary sector of services. The expansion of this industry is one of the most influential factors in the design profession, but teaching is more than a service activity; it is a helping activity.
There is a clear conceptual difference between service and support due to their purpose. Both involve relationships among people, but the service relationship aims to offer something that you cannot or will not get for yourself, which differs from the helping relationship. The recipient of a service primarily acts through voluntary resignation and conscious choice.
In education, the service relationship is not present. In the acquisition of knowledge, the learner acts upon themselves for better and more effective learning, growth, or development. The helping relationship is established as cooperation, as assistance for the learner to try something themselves, something they can and should achieve on their own, but which is promoted and facilitated with the help of another. In the service relationship, the provider benefits, while the recipient is passive. In the helping relationship, the recipient is empowered in their own actions and becomes an active agent.
Examining the relationship between service and support, teaching falls within the latter. The gold standard of educational work is not to substitute for the learner’s actions but to assist them until they are self-sufficient.
Helping professions are based mainly on the subjective dimension of work and the ethical precedence over the technical, without disregarding the latter. The sense of ethics in helping professions predominantly takes place in educational work, as ethical behavior towards the learner is intended to promote ethical behavior in the learner. All educational activity aims to teach something to someone.
The eminent value of teaching is expressed in its radical ethics within the helping professions, which are defined mainly by their ethical sense. However, at present, it seems that social recognition is not forthcoming.
5. Defining Characteristics of Helping Professions
There are five essential characteristics that define the nature of any helping profession, with a constant sense of self and time: competence, initiative, responsibility, dedication, and commitment.
Competence
The ability or capacity to solve work-related problems can be considered equivalent to the requirement of scientific-technical expertise. It is the realization of theoretical knowledge through subjective experience, with sufficient, diverse, and updated knowledge about the objective. A competent person is not just someone who knows, but someone who knows how to act and knows how to do things. Competence encompasses the professional’s authority and the social value attributed to them for their proven ability in a task. Competence expresses the synthesis of knowledge and practice, doctrine and capability, knowledge and action.
Personal Initiative
It is an aspect of competence, and one can rarely exist without the other. It is resolved in foresight and innovation, which are indispensable in helping professions since the situations and problems characteristic of these professions are very diverse. Although they can be theoretically classified, each has a unique and unrepeatable nuance or appearance due to the circumstances of each person. Being able to anticipate actions is crucial in providing effective help.
Furthermore, the helping situation involves a human reality. In many cases, due to a lack of motivation and activity in the learner, the teacher encounters situations that transcend the academic sphere, hindering convenient and effective assistance. Initiative becomes a substitute for professional autonomy in practice; when favorable performance is combined with personal initiative, it fosters personal autonomy.
Responsibility
Accountability is essential when speaking of competence and personal initiative. According to Zubiri, responsibility can be defined as taking charge. It involves an obligation, not imposed but accepted by the subject, who chooses to take ownership of the consequences of their actions and aims to improve those actions to achieve increasingly beneficial consequences. Constant updating is inherent in responsibility.
Responsibility is the flip side of freedom. Freedom increases the operational potential of the subject, and from that growth comes awareness of actions and responsibility for their effects. Responsibility denotes the ability to respond to one’s actions, to others, and to oneself. True responsibility is also a dimension of autonomy in action. Responsibility, a moral quality in itself, is characteristic of every professional. In the competence offered by a professional, there is an implicit commitment to the interest and benefit of the client, without admitting the possibility of shirking responsibility or placing blame.
The individualization of care inherent in every task requires the professional to be replaced, but not accompanied in their performance, because it is radically personal.
Dedication
This characteristic has the sense of offering or giving oneself. It implies focusing on something beyond simply dealing with it; occupation is a transient and unstable activity. When someone is dedicated to something, their attitude goes beyond that of someone merely employed. The dynamics of a task performed with dedication tend towards persistence. Dedication does not have a quantitative, extensive meaning but rather a qualitative, intensive one. In the helping professions, there is a genuine dedication to the people who are recipients of help. In these professions, dedication means focusing on those individuals.
Commitment
These characteristics of the helping professions cannot be achieved without the practitioner’s personal commitment. Commitment is not measurable by its very nature; a commitment can only be understood as an entirely personal act. There is no other way to uphold the requirements of competence, initiative, responsibility, and dedication than through an appeal to personal commitment, which represents a level of excellence in professional performance.