Vol. 5, Issue 9, Part A (2019)

Abstract
Teachers’ growth and development has garnered much attention in recent years. In this context we may note that the concept of being a teacher has been ever evolving considering it entails dimensions such as knowledge, ethics, and professional experience. In contrast, more recently terms such as competence, skills, attributes, accountability and commitment has come to override the earlier mentioned antecedents. Beginning with the processes within which teacher preparation operates and moving towards the practices in which the teachers continue to engage in their daily work settings, there is a need to examine underlying phenomena shaping this extensive canopy pronouncing teacher professionalism. This paper tries to understand the processes and practices that have come up to shape, (re)define and (re)conceptualize the roles, practices, and modes of professionalism with respect to teachers in higher educational institutions and settings. It elucidates the involved descriptions of the changing discursive domains within which the larger realities of higher educational teaching are being conceptualized lately. It aims to illustrate the various determinants of the shifting ecosystem of Indian universities that has overthrown its conventional dependencies on centralized, state owned, and welfarist affinities. Thus, it highlights the interventions arising out of ever penetrating adoption of economically rational practices in university teaching but also the circumstantial integration of ‘means’ contributing towards teachers’ construction of a pre-ordained ‘professional self’.