The deprofessionalisation of teachers in Thailand’s education reform

The thesis explores how and why teachers in Thailand experience limitations to their professional agency, identity and autonomy—despite decades of government reforms which have been in large part aimed at improving the quality and status of the profession. Anchored in the recognition that teachers are the critical link between education reform and its beneficiaries, the thesis examines this phenemenon with an aim to provide a holistic, in-depth and contextually grounded understanding. This is guided by three research questions:

1. What does being a ‘professional’ teacher involve for teachers in Thailand?
2. What are the different ways that teachers experience deprofessionalisation or limitations to enacting their professionalism and professional agency?
3. What mechanisms within Thailand’s education system and reform contribute to these different forms of teacher deprofessionalisation? How do they work together to reproduce a deprofessionalised teaching profession?

The study involved in-depth interviews with 26 policy actors and 18 teachers, and employed elements of social constructionist, critical policy and policy ethnography perspectives to produce three ‘layers’ of empirical insights:

1. Cultural foundations of teacher identity: Teachers’ professional identity in Thailand is shaped by notions of ‘teachership’ and the ‘teacher’s spirit’ diverge from Western conceptions and create unique professional expectations.
2. Eight constructions of deprofessionalisation: The research identifies eight distinct but interconnected ways that teachers experience deprofessionalisation, highlighting its complex and multifaceted nature.
3. System-level mechanisms: These insights reveal five major clusters of systemic mechanisms that contribute to the problem of teacher deprofessionalisation, pointing to how this is a structurally, systematically and discursively situated phenomenon. These understandings also reveal root causes, amplifying elements and self-reinforcing cycles that interact to produce a system-wide effect.

Additionally, this thesis offers theoretical and methodological contributions, including the utility of incorporating local cultural logics into research design and alternative theorisations of teacher professionalism and professional identity. By examining how neoliberal governance technologies adapt to Thailand’s hierarchical and centralised education system, the study also broadens understanding of how policy approaches originating from the Global North can manifest in unexpected ways in a local Southern context of particular cultural logics, sociopolitical conditions and administrative traditions.