Changing lives and standardising teachers : the possibilities and limits of professional standards

Along with a range of other neoliberal managerial incursions into education, the bureaucratisation of teachers' work has included the development of Professional Standards that regulate the profession and purport to improve teacher quality. This paper begins by contrasting two alternative approaches to standards in Australia, the new, centrally developed National Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2011a) and the earlier profession-developed Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (AATE/ALEA, 2002). It examines the differing designs, contexts and effects of these sets of standards, and maps differences and similarities between them. The second half of the paper then turns to narratives from prominent Australians of their outstanding English teachers in Teachers Who Change Lives (Metcalfe & Game, 2006) and My Favourite Teacher (Macklin, 2011), reading these narratives through the standards frameworks. The paper concludes that the shift to a regulatory and managerial approach to the teaching profession risks obscuring many of the essential elements of good teaching, in particular the affective dimensions that mobilise and animate teaching and learning.