19 AUTONOMY? OR RESPONSIBILITY? Barbara S. Stengel Department of Educational Foundations Millersville University One has to read to the end of Alice Pitt’s dense article to understand what is really bothering her. There, for the first time, she refers to ‘‘the public’s anxieties over what it is that teachers do behind the closed doors of their classrooms,’’ and expresses concern over ‘‘the contemporary landscape that structures debate about what the Ontario Ministry of Education describes as public confidence in education.’’ 1 Educators, those professionals whose work is the driving force of schools, are not trusted. Their knowledge and expertise is disrespected; their autonomy is threatened. It is for this reason that Pitt and her colleagues are conducting an empirical study of the profession of teaching, of teachers’ perceptions of their influence, authority, and autonomy. And it is in one of the interviews conducted for that study that Pitt encounters a young teacher whose experience is emblematic of the conceptual and political ambiguity surrounding the very notion of autonomy. Pitt realizes that threats to autonomy and sources of disrespect arise within the profession as well as without. She sets out to consider the ‘‘impossible profession’’ of education, citing Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hannah Arendt, and Deborah Britzman as her companions. What I find most helpful in Pitt’s essay is her insistence that affect cannot be separated from reason in any consideration of professional autonomy. What I find curious is her focus on autonomy as the critical concept for this consideration of the breakdown of professional life in teaching. These points structure the central part of my essay. But these points are subsidiary to questions about Pitt’s interpretation of a novice teacher’s experience of her own professional knowledge and how her colleagues receive her. So I begin and end this response with some thoughts about the case that anchors Pitt’s theorizing. ‘‘Unruly Exuberance’’ Meets ‘‘War Stories’’ Pitt’s problematic is personal and professional as well as philosophical. Like me, she is a teacher educator (though removed by several degrees). Preparing young people and older career changers to take on the responsibility of teaching in an environment fraught with skepticism about teachers’ qualifications and effective- ness is tough enough. Educating them to recognize the tenuous and ambiguous nature of this relational work in a wider world controlled by a continuing quest for cognitive certainty and a profound discomfort with affect-inspired ambiguity 1. Alice Pitt, ‘‘On Having One’s Chance: Autonomy as Education’s Limit,’’ in this volume, 15–16. This work will be cited in the text as HOC for all subsequent references. EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 60 Number 1 2010  2010 Board of Trustees University of Illinois