Abstract:

The professional culture refers to the way in which teachers develop their activities in educational institutions. Through this, the work accomplished acquires significance and the new teachers learn to solve their problems, being, little by little, integrated into the professional community. The professional culture of teachers comprises the beliefs, values, habits and assumed ways of doing things that are shared within a particular group of teachers or in the teaching community of which they are part and can be observed in the relationships among teachers. In turn, teacher professionality is understood as what is specific in the teacher action, that is, the set of behaviours, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that constitute the specificity of being a teacher. The professional interaction of teachers contributes, to a greater or lesser extent, to the educational success of students, and is often related to the quality of teacher professionality. The professional culture and teacher professionality have been gaining visibility in recent research, especially with regard to higher education, due to the growth and complexity of this subsystem of education in today's societies.

The higher education has experienced profound transformations that require significant challenges from the teacher, namely the conciliation between a more student-centered teaching and the production of knowledge through research and publication. The equilibrium or not between these two aspects, or the way in which higher education teachers perceive their professionality, seems to be related to the professional culture of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to which they belong and as a result of the meanings that each HEI creates, through the rituals, routines, beliefs or ethics, repercussions in the way that the teachers carry out their activity, in the relations that they have among themselves and in the practices that they use. In this text, we try to understand the relationship between professional culture and teacher professionality in higher education. We conclude that, in higher education, the teacher action is related to the ways they assume to do things, because the professional culture gives meaning to the teacher professionality. What teachers do in terms of teaching and research is affected by the perspectives and orientations of colleagues with whom they work in particular groups or in the wider teaching community.

Keywords:

Professional culture, teacher professionality, higher education, higher education institutions.