Teaching as a Helping Profession: Competence, Initiative, and Responsibility
4. Teaching as a Profession for Help
The notion of support is essential to understand the essence of educational work and its due professionalism. In modern economic classification of labor, teaching is in the tertiary sector of services. The expansion of this industry is one of the most influential factors in the profession’s design, but teaching is more than a service activity; it is an activity of help. There is a clear conceptual difference between service and support because of their purpose. Both are relationships among people, but the service relationship is trying to offer something that you cannot or will not get for yourself. This is not the same as the aid relationship. The receiver of the service is, first and foremost, responsible for their voluntary resignation and self-conscious action. In education, the service relationship is not given. In the acquisition of knowledge, the learner acts on themself for better and more effective learning, growth, or development. The aid relationship is established as cooperation, such as assistance for the learner to try something themself, something that can and should be achieved on their own, but is promoted and propitiated with the help of another. In the service relationship, the provider is someone who gets good, a passive recipient. In the helping relationship, the recipient is strengthened in their own action; they are an active agent. Examining the relationship of service and support, teaching falls among the latter. The gold standard of educational work is not to substitute for the learner in action but to assist until sufficient on their own. The caring professions are based mainly on the subjective dimension of work and ethical precedence over technique, without this being contemptible. The sense of ethics in the helping professions predominantly takes place in educational work, as ethical behavior towards the learner promotes the learner’s ethical behavior. All educational activities aim to teach something to someone. The eminent value of teaching is expressed in its radical ethics in the helping professions, which are defined mainly by the ethical sense, but at the moment, social recognition seems lacking.
5. Notes Defining a Work of Help
There are five essential notes that define the nature of any task to help, with a constant sense of self and time: competence, initiative, responsibility, dedication, and commitment.
1 – Competence
The ability or capacity to solve labor problems can be considered equivalent to the requirement of scientific-technical corrections. It is the realization of theoretical knowledge from a subjective experience, with sufficient, current knowledge about the purpose. A competent person is not so much who knows, but who knows how to act and knows how. In competence lies the authority of the professional and their social value, wanted for their proven ability in a task. Competence expresses the synthesis of knowledge and practice, doctrine and capability, knowledge and action.
2 – Personal Initiative
It is an aspect of competence and can rarely exist without the other. It is resolved in advance and innovation, which are essential in the relief effort since the situations and problems characteristic of these are very different. Although theoretically, they can be classified, each has a different tint or look, unique and unrepeatable circumstances because of each person. Being able to anticipate actions is fundamental to providing aid. Also, in a care situation across the referent is a human reality. In many cases of lack of motivation and activity for the learner, the teacher encounters situations that transcend the academic sphere, where assistance is no longer convenient and effective. The initiative is a substitute for professional practice autonomy; when performance with personal initiative is favorable, it fosters personal autonomy.
3 – Responsibility
Accountability is essential to speak 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 wants to take over the consequences of their actions and aims to improve the action to achieve increasingly beneficial consequences. Responsibility requires constant updating. Responsibility is the flip side of freedom. Freedom increases the operational potential of the subject, and from that growth, they become aware of their actions and respond to the effects. Responsibility denotes the ability to respond to one’s actions, to others, and to oneself. Real responsibility is also a dimension of autonomy of action. Responsibility, a moral quality in itself, is typical of every professional. In offering professional competence, it is implicit to bear the interest and benefit of the customer and not admit the possibility of discharge or pinning the blame. The individualization of care involves every task requiring the professional to be replaced but not accompanied in their performance because it is radically personal.
4 – Dedication
This note has the sense of offering or delivery. Focusing on something more to deal with it; occupation is a transient and unstable activity. When someone is engaged in something beyond their attitude, it indicates the disposition of the employed person. The dynamics of a task performed with dedication tend to persistence. Dedication does not have an extensive and quantitative sense but an intensive and qualitative one. In the caring professions, there is a real dedication to the recipients of aid. In the caring professions, dedication leads to concentration on those individuals.
5 – Engagement
These characteristics of the caring professions cannot be realized except through the practitioner’s personal commitment. Commitment is not measurable by its very nature; a compromise can only be understood from an entirely personal act. There is no other possibility to support the requirements of competence, initiative, responsibility, and dedication but to appeal to personal commitment. They represent a level of excellence in professional performance.