Beginning teacher subjectivity and pedagogical encounters in low SES schools

Beginning teachers are frequently positioned by politicians and media as a key problem impeding the quality of education in Australia. As the rhetoric of crisis increases, so have regulatory interventions including mandated curriculum, testing and accreditation processes. Teachers at all levels of schooling, in all sites and all states must now map professional ‘knowledge’, ‘practice’ and engagement against the mandatory Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2017). Within teacher education courses, assessment tasks coach students to gather evidence of achievement at graduate level across seven designated standards (e.g. 1: ‘Know students and how they learn’) and 37 designated focus areas (e.g. 1.1: ‘Physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students’). After beginning teaching, within three years they must demonstrate ‘Proficient’ level. These standards have been described as ‘top-down, technical, decontextualized, politicised’ frameworks with which the education sector is uncritically and compliantly infatuated (Down, 2012: 64). In contrast, this chapter insists that teaching is affectively, relationally and materially contingent (Gannon, 2012a). Rather than eschew the messy specificities of context, this chapter delves into classrooms.